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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000015- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
16 number.
17
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000018- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
19 a TypeError exception.
20
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000024- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
25
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000026- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
27
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000028- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
29
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000030Library
31-------
32
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000033- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
34 CHARSET fields better.
35
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +000036- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
37 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
38 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
39 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +000040
Raymond Hettinger3081d592003-08-09 18:30:57 +000041- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
42 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
43 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
44
Raymond Hettingerb5a42082003-08-08 05:10:41 +000045- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
46 of raising a TypeError exception.
47
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000048- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +000049 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
50 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
51
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000052- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
53 and removed in Py2.4.
54
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000055Tools/Demos
56-----------
57
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +000058- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
59 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
60 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
61 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
62 now.
63
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000064- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
65 in effect
66
67- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
68 C-c C-h
69
70Build
71-----
72
73C API
74-----
75
76New platforms
77-------------
78
79Tests
80-----
81
82Windows
83-------
84
85Mac
86----
87
88
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +000089What's New in Python 2.3 final?
90===============================
91
92*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
93
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +000094IDLE
95----
96
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +000097- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
98 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
99 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
100 context-menu actions.
101
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000102- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
103 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
104 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
105 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
106 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
107 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
108 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
109 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
110 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
111
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000112
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000113What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
114=============================================
115
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000116*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000117
118Core and builtins
119-----------------
120
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000121- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000122 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000123 comment at the end are still unsupported.
124
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000125Extension modules
126-----------------
127
128- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
129 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
130 than once. This has been fixed.
131
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000132- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
133 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
134 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
135 call.
136
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000137- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
138
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000139Library
140-------
141
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000142- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
143 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
144
145- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
146 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
147 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
148 restored.
149
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000150IDLE
151----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000152
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000153- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000154
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000155Build
156-----
157
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000158- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
159 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
160
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000161C API
162-----
163
164Windows
165-------
166
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000167- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
168 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
169
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000170- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
171
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000172Mac
173---
174
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000175- Various fixes to pimp.
176
177- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
178
179- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
180 more problems than it solves.
181
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000182
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000183What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
184=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000185
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000186*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
187
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000188Core and builtins
189-----------------
190
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000191- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
192 by sys.setcheckinterval().
193
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000194- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
195 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000196 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000197
198- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
199 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
200 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000201 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000202
203- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
204 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000205
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000206- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
207 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
208 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
209
210- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000211 770247.
212
213- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000214
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000215Extension modules
216-----------------
217
218- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
219 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
220
221- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
222
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000223- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
224
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000225- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
226 contained within the _strptime module.
227
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000228- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
229 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
230
231- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000232 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
233
234- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
235 the find_class attribute, if present.
236
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000237- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000238
239 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
240 (SF bug 763298).
241
242 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000243 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
244 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
245 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000246
247 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
248
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000249Library
250-------
251
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000252- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
253
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000254- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
255 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
256 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
257 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
258 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
259 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
260 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
261 or Tester().
262
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000263- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
264 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
265 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
266 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
267 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
268 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
269 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
270 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
271 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000272
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000273 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000274
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000275- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
276 weren't before was an oversight.
277
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000278- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
279 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
280
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000281- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
282 when there are no lines.
283
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000284- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
285 which could occur with Tk 8.4
286
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000287- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
288 to child processes.
289
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000290- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
291
292- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
293
294- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
295 xmlrpclib.
296
297- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
298 responses.
299
300- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
301 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
302
303- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
304 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
305 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
306
307- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
308 used as patterns.
309
310- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
311 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
312 than Tk 8.3.
313
314- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
315
316- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000317
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000318Tools/Demos
319-----------
320
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000321- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
322
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000323- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
324
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000325- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000326
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000327Build
328-----
329
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000330- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
331
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000332- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
333
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000334- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
335 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000336
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000337- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
338 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
339 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000340
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000341C API
342-----
343
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000344- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
345 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
346
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000347Windows
348-------
349
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000350- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
351 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
352 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
353 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
354 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
355 Python exception ::
356
357 thread.error: can't start new thread
358
359 is raised now.
360
361- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
362 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
363 instead of from DLL teardown.
364
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000365Mac
366---
367
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000368- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000369 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000370 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
371 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
372 the executable in the bundle.
373
374- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000375
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000376- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
377
378- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
379 on Panther.
380
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000381What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
382================================
383
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000384*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000385
386Core and builtins
387-----------------
388
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000389- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
390 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
391 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
392 with the -i option.
393
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000394- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
395 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
396
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000397- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
398 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
399
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000400- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
401 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
402 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
403 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
404 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
405 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
406 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
407 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
408 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
409 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
410 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
411 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
412 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000413
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000414- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
415 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
416 embedded in a lambda expression.
417
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000418- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
419 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
420 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
421 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
422 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
423
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000424- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
425 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
426 matches the restriction on classic classes.
427
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000428- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
429 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
430
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000431- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
432 It's writable again.
433
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000434- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
435 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
436 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000437 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000438
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000439- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
440 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
441 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
442
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000443Extension modules
444-----------------
445
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000446- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
447 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
448
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000449- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
450 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
451 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
452 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
453
454- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
455 collection.
456
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000457- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
458 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
459 unique within a single program run.
460
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000461- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
462 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
463
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000464- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
465 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
466
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000467- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
468 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000469
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000470- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
471
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000472- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
473 Fixes SF bug #730685.
474
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000475- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
476 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
477 for many BSD-derived systems.
478
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000479
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000480Library
481-------
482
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000483- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
484 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
485 primary ones:
486
487 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
488 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
489 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
490
491 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
492 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
493 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
494 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
495 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
496 framework features (which doctest lacks).
497
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000498- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
499 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
500 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
501 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
502 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
503 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
504 argument.
505
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000506- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
507 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
508 in the archive.
509
510- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
511 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
512
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000513- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
514 569574).
515
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000516- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
517 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
518 no more.
519
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000520- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
521 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
522 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
523 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
524 code coverage.
525
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000526- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
527 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
528 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000529 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
530 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000531
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000532- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
533 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
534 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000535 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000536
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000537- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
538
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000539- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
540 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
541 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
542 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
543
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000544- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
545 handling.
546
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000547- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
548 __doc__ of data descriptors.
549
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000550- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
551 in socket.py.
552
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000553- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
554
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000555- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
556 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
557 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
558 opener with proxy support.
559
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000560- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
561
562- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
563
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000564Tools/Demos
565-----------
566
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000567- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
568
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000569- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
570
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000571- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
572 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000573
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000574- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
575 files.
576
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000577Build
578-----
579
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000580- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000581 different root directory.
582
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000583C API
584-----
585
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000586- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
587 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
588 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
589 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
590 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
591 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
592 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
593 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
594 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
595 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
596
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000597- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
598 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
599 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
600 from Python.
601
602
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000603New platforms
604-------------
605
606None this time.
607
608Tests
609-----
610
611- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
612 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
613
614Windows
615-------
616
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000617- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
618
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000619- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
620 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
621 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
622 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
623 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
624 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
625 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
626 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
627 that's what it's for.
628
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000629Mac
630---
631
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000632- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
633 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
634 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
635 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000636- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
637 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
638- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000639
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000640SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
641------------------------------------
642
643430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
644598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
645622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
646661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
647683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
648697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
649713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
650724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
651727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
652729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
653730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
654731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
655732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
656733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
657735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
658740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
659744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
660745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
661747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
662749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
663751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
664753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
665755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
666757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
667760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
668
669
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000670What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
671================================
672
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000673*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000674
675Core and builtins
676-----------------
677
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000678- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
679 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
680
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000681- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
682 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
683 and cannot be strings).
684
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000685- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
686 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
687 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
688 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
689
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000690- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
691 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
692 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
693 Python itself.
694
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000695- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
696 the referenced object, if it has one.
697
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000698- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
699 the thread started at
700 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
701
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000702- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
703 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
704 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
705 placed on a list index.
706
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000707- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
708 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
709 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
710 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
711
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000712- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
713 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
714 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
715 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
716 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
717 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
718 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
719
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000720- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
721 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
722 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
723 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
724 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
725
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000726- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
727 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000728
729- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
730 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
731 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
732 #693195.)
733
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000734- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
735 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000736
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000737- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000738 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000739 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
740 interpreter executions, would fail.
741
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000742- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000743 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000744 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000745
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000746Extension modules
747-----------------
748
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000749- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
750 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
751 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
752 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
753
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000754- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
755 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
756
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000757- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
758 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
759 and Greg Chapman.)
760
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000761- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
762 recursively.
763
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000764- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000765 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
766 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
767 leaks.
768
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000769- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
770
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000771- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
772 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
773 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
774 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
775 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
776 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
777 #705836.
778
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000779- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000780 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
781
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000782- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
783 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
784 See SF bug #692416.
785
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000786- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
787 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
788
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000789- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
790 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
791 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000792
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000793- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000794 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
795 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
796
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000797- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
798 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
799 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
800 timeouts to work properly.
801
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000802Library
803-------
804
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000805- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
806 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
807 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
808 future release.
809
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000810- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
811 for querying platform dependent features.
812
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000813- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000814
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000815- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
816 pickle protocol versions.
817
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000818- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
819 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
820 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
821
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000822- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
823
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000824- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
825 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
826 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
827 modules.
828
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000829- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
830 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
831 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
832
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000833- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
834 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
835
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000836- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
837 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
838 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
839
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000840- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000841 MS Office extensions.
842
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000843- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
844 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
845
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000846- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
847 execution speed of expressions and statements.
848
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000849- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
850 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
851 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
852 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
853 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
854 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
855
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000856- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
857 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
858 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000859
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000860- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
861 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
862 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
863
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000864- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
865
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000866- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
867 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
868 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
869
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000870Tools/Demos
871-----------
872
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000873- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
874 See the module docstring for details.
875
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000876Build
877-----
878
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000879- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
880 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000881
882C API
883-----
884
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000885- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
886
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000887- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
888 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
889 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
890
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000891- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
892 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000893
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000894 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
895 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
896 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000897
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000898- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000899 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
900
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000901- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
902 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
903 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000904
905New platforms
906-------------
907
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000908None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000909
910Tests
911-----
912
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000913- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
914 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000915
916Windows
917-------
918
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000919- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
920 function.
921
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000922- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
923 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000924
925Mac
926---
927
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000928- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
929 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000930
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000931- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
932 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000933
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000934- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
935 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
936 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000937
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000938- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000939 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
940 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000941
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000942- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
943 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000944
945
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000946What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
947=================================
948
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000949*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000950
951Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000952-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000953
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000954- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
955 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
956 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
957
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000958- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
959 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
960 (SF patch #664376.)
961
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000962- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
963 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
964 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
965 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
966 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
967 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000968 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000969
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000970- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
971 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
972 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
973 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000974 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000975
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000976- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
977 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
978 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
979 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
980 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
981 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
982 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
983 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
984 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
985 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
986 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
987
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000988- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
989 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
990 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
991 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
992 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
993 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
994
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000995- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
996 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
997
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000998- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
999 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1000 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1001 case.)
1002
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001003- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1004 passed as unicode strings.
1005
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001006- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1007 See SF bug #683467.
1008
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001009- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1010 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1011
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001012- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1013
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001014- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1015
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001016- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1017 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1018 arguments.
1019
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001020- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1021 See SF bug #667147.
1022
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001023- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001024 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001025 See SF bug #676155.
1026
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001027- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001028 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001029 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1030 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1031 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1032 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1033 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1034 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001035
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001036Extension modules
1037-----------------
1038
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001039- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1040 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1041 tp_as_number pointer.
1042
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001043- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1044 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1045 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1046 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1047 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1048
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001049- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1050
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001051- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1052
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001053- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001054 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001055 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1056 patch #678531.)
1057
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001058- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1059 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1060
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001061- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1062 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1063
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001064- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1065
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001066- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1067 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1068 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1069
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001070- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1071
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001072- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1073 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1074
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001075- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001076
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001077- datetime changes:
1078
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001079 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1080
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001081 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1082 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1083 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1084 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1085 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1086 now.
1087
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001088 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001089 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1090 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001091
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001092 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001093 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001094 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1095 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1096 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1097 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001098
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001099 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1100 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1101 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001102 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1103
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001104 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1105 by a later example coded by Guido.
1106
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001107 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001108 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1109 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1110 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001111 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1112 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1113
1114 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1115 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1116 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1117 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1118 tzinfo subclass instance.
1119
1120 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1121 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1122 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1123 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1124 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1125 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1126 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1127 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001128
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001129 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1130 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1131 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1132 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1133 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001134 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1135
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001136 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001137
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001138 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1139 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1140 as a naive datetime object.
1141
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001142 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1143 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1144 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1145
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001146 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1147 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1148 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1149 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1150 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1151 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1152 comparison.
1153
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001154 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1155 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1156 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1157 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001158 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001159
1160 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001161
1162 and ::
1163
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001164 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1165
1166 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1167 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1168 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1169 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1170
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001171 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1172 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1173 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1174 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1175 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1176
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001177 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1178 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001179 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1180 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001181
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001182Library
1183-------
1184
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001185- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1186 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1187
1188- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1189 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1190 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1191 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1192 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1193 See PEP 307 for details.
1194
1195- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1196 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1197
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001198- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1199 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001200 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001201 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1202 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001203 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001204
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001205- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1206 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1207
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001208- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1209 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1210 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1211
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001212- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1213
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001214- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1215 exception.
1216
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001217- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1218 class.
1219
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001220- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1221 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1222 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1223
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001224- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1225 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1226
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001227- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001228 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1229 See SF bug #659228.
1230
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001231- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1232 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1233 See SF patch #651082.
1234
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001235- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001236
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001237- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1238 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1239
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001240- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001241 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001242
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001243- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1244 DOS paths from other platforms.
1245
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001246Tools/Demos
1247-----------
1248
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001249- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1250 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1251 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1252 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1253 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1254 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1255 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1256 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1257 example:
1258
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001259 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1260 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001261
1262 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1263
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001264
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001265Build
1266-----
1267
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001268- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1269 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1270 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001271 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1272
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001273 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1274
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001275- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1276 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1277 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1278 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1279 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1280 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1281 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1282 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1283 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1284
1285- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1286 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1287 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1288 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1289
1290- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1291 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1292
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001293C API
1294-----
1295
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001296- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1297 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001298
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001299- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1300 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1301 tp_as_number pointer.
1302
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001303- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1304 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1305 (SF #681367)
1306
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001307- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1308 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1309 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1310 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001311
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001312Tests
1313-----
1314
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001315- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001316 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1317 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1318 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1319 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1320 pydoc.)
1321
1322- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1323
1324- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001325
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001326Windows
1327-------
1328
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001329- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1330 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1331 time).
1332
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001333- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1334 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1335
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001336- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1337 release without strong cryptography.
1338
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001339- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001340 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001341
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001342- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1343 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1344
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001345Mac
1346---
1347
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001348- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1349 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001350
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001351- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1352 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1353 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001354
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001355- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1356 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001357
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001358- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1359 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1360 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1361 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001362
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001363- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001364 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1365 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1366 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001368
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001369What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001370=================================
1371
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001372*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001373
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001374Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001375--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001376
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001377- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1378
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001379- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1380 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001381 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001382 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001383 a different meaning than before.
1384
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001385- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001386 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001387 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001388
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001389- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001390 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001391 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001392
1393- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1394 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1395 and deallocation.
1396
1397- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1398 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1399
1400- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1401 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1402 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1403 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1404 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1405
1406- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1407 now detected by the garbage collector.
1408
1409- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1410 [SF bug 519621]
1411
1412- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1413 identifier.
1414
1415- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1416 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1417 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1418 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1419 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1420 [SF bug 563060]
1421
1422- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1423 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1424 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1425 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1426 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1427
1428- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1429 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1430 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1431
1432- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1433
1434- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1435 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1436 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1437 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1438 state of the slots would be lost.)
1439
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001440Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001441-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001442
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001443- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001444 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1445 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1446 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1447 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001448 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1449 Jython 2.1.
1450
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001451- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001452 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001453 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1454 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1455 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1456 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1457 these, see PEP 302.
1458
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001459- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1460 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1461 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1462
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001463- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1464 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1465 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1466
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001467- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1468 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1469 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1470
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001471- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1472 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1473 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1474 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1475 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1476 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1477 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1478 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1479 releases or implementations.
1480
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001481- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001482 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1483 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001484
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001485- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1486 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1487
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001488- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1489 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1490 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1491
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001492- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1493 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1494
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001495- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1496 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001497 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1498 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001499
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001500- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1501 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1502 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1503 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1504 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1505
1506 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1507 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1508 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1509 pattern.
1510
1511 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1512 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1513 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1514 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1515
1516 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1517 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1518 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1519 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1520 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1521 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1522
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001523- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1524 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1525 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1526 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1527 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1528 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1529 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1530 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001531
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001532- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1533 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1534 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1535 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1536 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001537 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1538 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1539 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1540 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1541 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1542 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1543 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001544
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001545- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1546 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1547
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001548- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1549 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1550 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1551 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1552 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1553 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1554 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1555 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1556 to Zack Weinberg!
1557
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001558- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1559 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1560 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1561 type. This has been fixed now.
1562
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001563- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1564 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1565 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1566
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001567- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1568 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1569 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1570 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1571 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1572 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1573 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1574 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001575 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001576
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001577- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1578 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1579 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001580
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001581- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1582 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1583 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1584 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1585 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1586 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1587 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1588 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001589 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001590 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1591 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1592
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001593- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1594 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1595 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1596 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1597 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1598 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1599 this.)
1600
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001601- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1602 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001603 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001604 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001605 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1606 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001607 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1608 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001609
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001610- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1611 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1612 currently running.
1613
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001614- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1615 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1616 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1617 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1618
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001619- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1620 as directory names.
1621
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001622- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1623 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1624
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001625- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1626 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1627
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001628- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001629 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1630 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001631
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001632- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1633 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1634 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1635 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1636 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1637
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001638- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1639 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1640 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1641 removed.
1642
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001643- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1644 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1645 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1646
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001647- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1648 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1649 to __debug__.
1650
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001651- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1652 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1653 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1654
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001655- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1656 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1657 deprecated now.
1658
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001659- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1660 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1661 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001662
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001663- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1664 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1665 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1666 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1667 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001668
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001669- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1670 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1671
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001672- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1673 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1674 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001675 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001676 is backward compatible.
1677
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001678- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1679 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1680 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1681 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1682 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1683
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001684- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1685 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1686 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1687 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1688 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1689 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001690
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001691- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1692 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1693
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001694- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1695 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1696
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001697- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1698 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1699 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1700 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1701 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1702
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001703- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1704 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1705 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1706
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001707- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001708 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1709
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001710- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1711 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1712 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001713
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001714- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1715 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1716
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001717- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1718 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1719 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1720
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001721- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1722
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001723Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001724-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001725
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001726- Added three operators to the operator module:
1727 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1728 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1729 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1730
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001731- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1732
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001733- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1734 archives.
1735
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001736- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1737 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1738 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1739
1740 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1741
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001742- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1743 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1744 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001745 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001746
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001747- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1748 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1749 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1750 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001751 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1752 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1753 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1754 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001755
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001756- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1757 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001758
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001759- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1760
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001761- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1762 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1763
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001764- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1765 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1766 supported.
1767
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001768- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1769
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001770- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1771 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001772
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001773- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1774 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1775
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001776- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1777
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001778- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1779 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1780
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001781- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1782 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1783 functions but callable type objects.
1784
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001785- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001786 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001787 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001788
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001789- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1790 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001791
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001792- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1793 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001794
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001795- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1796 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1797 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1798 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1799
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001800- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1801 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001802
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001803- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1804 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1805 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1806 and __imul__.
1807
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001808- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001809 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1810 is called.
1811
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001812- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1813 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1814 interpreter was compiled.
1815
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001816- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1817 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1818 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001819 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001820 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1821 1, not 2.
1822
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001823- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1824 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1825 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1826 limit.
1827
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001828- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1829 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1830 bug #623464.
1831
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001832- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1833 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1834 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1835 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001837Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001838-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001839
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001840- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1841
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001842- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1843 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1844 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1845 with Python 2.3a2.
1846
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001847- os.path exposes getctime.
1848
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001849- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001850 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001851 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001852 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001853 unit tests of floating point results.
1854
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001855- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1856 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1857 has been increased.
1858
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001859- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1860 executed.
1861
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001862- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1863 postinstallation script.
1864
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001865- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1866 test the current module.
1867
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001868- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001869 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1870 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1871 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1872 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1873
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001874- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001875 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001876 Ward's Optik package.
1877
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001878- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1879 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1880 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1881 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1882
1883- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1884 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001885 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001886
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001887- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1888 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1889 shelf are binary pickles.
1890
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001891- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1892 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1893
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001894- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1895 modules are iterators now.
1896
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001897- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1898 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1899 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1900 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1901 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1902 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001903
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001904- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1905 with their entity value.
1906
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001907- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1908
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001909- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1910 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001911
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001912- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1913 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001914 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001915
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001916- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1917 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1918 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1919 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1920 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1921 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1922 main():
1923
1924 import locale
1925 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1926
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001927- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1928 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1929
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001930- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1931 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1932 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1933 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1934 to the new standard.
1935
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001936- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1937 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1938 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1939 an extension to the database.
1940
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001941- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1942 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1943 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1944 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001945 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001946
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001947- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001948 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001949
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001950- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1951 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1952 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1953 bounded integers.
1954
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001955- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1956 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1957 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1958 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1959 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1960 in existence.
1961
1962 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1963 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1964 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1965 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1966 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1967 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1968
1969 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1970 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1971 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1972 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1973
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001974- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1975 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1976 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1977
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001978- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1979
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001980- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1981 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1982 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1983 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1984
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001985- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1986 argument.
1987
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001988- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1989 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1990 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1991 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1992 [SF patch 560794].
1993
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001994- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1995 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1996 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001997 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1998 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1999 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002000
2001- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2002 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002003
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002004- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2005 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2006 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2007 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002008
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002009- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2010 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2011 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2012 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2013 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2014
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002015- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002016
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002017- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2018
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002019- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2020 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2021 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2022 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2023 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2024 identical to None.
2025
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002026- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2027 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2028 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2029 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2030 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2031 results now.
2032
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002033- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2034 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2035
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002036- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2037 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2038 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2039 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2040 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2041 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2042 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2043 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2044
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002045- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2046
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002047- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2048 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2049
2050- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2051 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2052 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2053 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2054 and other systems.
2055
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002056- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2057 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2058 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2059 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 +00002060 work well with these.
2061
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002062- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2063
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002064- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002065 connections.
2066
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002067- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2068 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2069 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2070
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002071- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2072 sets
2073
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002074- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2075 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2076 name.
2077
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002078- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2079 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2080 passed in.
2081
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002082- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002083 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002084 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2085 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002086
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002087- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2088
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002089- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2090
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002091- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2092 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2093 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2094
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002095- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2096 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2097 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2098 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002099 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002100
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002101- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002102 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002103 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002104
2105- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2106 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2107 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2108
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002109- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002110 the value of its expression argument.
2111
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002112- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2113 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2114 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2115
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002116- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2117 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2118 skipstone browser was included.
2119
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002120- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2121 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2122
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002123Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002124-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002125
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002126- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2127 names in addition to accepting file names.
2128
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002129- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2130 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2131 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2132 still used and useful.)
2133
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002134- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2135 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2136 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2137 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002138
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002139- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2140 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2141 the generated binary.
2142
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002143Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002144-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002145
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002146- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2147
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002148- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2149 except in the hands of experts.
2150
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002151- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002152 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2153 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2154 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002155
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002156- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2157 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2158 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2159 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2160 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2161 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2162 builds.
2163
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002164- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2165 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2166 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2167 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2168 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2169 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2170 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2171 new type.
2172
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002173- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002174
2175 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2176 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2177 positive infinities.
2178
2179 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2180 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2181 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2182 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2183 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2184 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2185 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2186
2187 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2188
2189 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2190
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002191- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2192 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2193 size of the executable.
2194
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002195- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2196 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2197 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2198 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002199
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002200- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2201
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002202- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2203 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2204 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002205
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002206- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2207 well as Unix.
2208
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002209- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2210 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2211 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2212 modules in the README file for details.
2213
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002214C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002215-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002216
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002217- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2218 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002219 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002220 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002221 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002222
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002223- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2224 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2225 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2226 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2227 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2228 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002229 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002230 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2231 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2232 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2233 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2234 aligned.)
2235
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002236- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2237 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2238 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2239
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002240- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2241 level.
2242
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002243- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2244 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2245 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2246 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2247 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2248
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002249- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2250 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2251 code.
2252
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002253- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2254 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2255 adjusting for negative indices.
2256
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002257- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2258 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2259 object.
2260
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002261- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2262 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2263 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2264
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002265- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2266 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002267
2268- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2269
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002270- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2271 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2272 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2273 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2274
2275- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2276
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002277- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002278
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002279- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002280 without going through the buffer API.
2281
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002283
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002284- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2285 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2286 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2287 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002289- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2290 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2291
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002292- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002293 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2294
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002295New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002297
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002298- OpenVMS is now supported.
2299
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002300- AtheOS is now supported.
2301
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002302- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2303
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002304- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002306Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002307-----
2308
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002309- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2310 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2311 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002312
2313Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002315
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002316- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2317 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2318 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2319 bugs.
2320 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002321 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002322 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2323 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002324 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002325
2326- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002327 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002328
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002329- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2330 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2331
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002332- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2333 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002334 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002335 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2336
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002337- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2338 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2339 use files" uninstall option).
2340
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002341- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2342
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002343- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2344 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2345
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002346- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2347 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2348 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2349
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002350- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2351 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2352 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2353 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2354 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002355 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2356 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2357 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002358
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002359- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002360 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002361 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2362 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2363 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2364 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2365 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2366 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2367 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2368 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2369 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2370 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2371 work around.
2372
2373- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2374 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2375 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2376 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2377 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2378 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2379 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2380 specified with O_CREAT too).
2381
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002382Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002383----
2384
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002385- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002386
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002387- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2388 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2389 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2390
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002391- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2392 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2393 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2394
2395- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2396 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2397 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2398 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2399 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2400 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2401 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2402 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002403
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002404- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2405 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2406 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002407
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002408- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2409 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2410 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2411 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2412 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002413
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002414- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2415 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2416 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002417
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002418- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2419 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002421- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2422 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2423 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2424 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2425 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002426
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002427- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2428 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2429 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2430
2431- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2432 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2433 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002434
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002435- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2436 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2437 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2438 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002439 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002441- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2442 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002443
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002444- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2445 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002446
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002447- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002448 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002449 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2450 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002451
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002452
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002453What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002454===============================
2455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002456*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2457
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002458Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002459--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002460
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002461- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2462 with a custom metaclass.
2463
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002464Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002465-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002466
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002467- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2468 are proxies.
2469
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002470Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002471-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002472
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002473- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2474 very short strings.
2475
2476- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2477 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2478 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2479 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2480 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2481
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002482Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002483-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002484
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002485- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2486 close or delete time).
2487
2488- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2489 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2490
2491- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2492
2493- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002494 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002495
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002496Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002497-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002498
2499Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002500-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002501
2502C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002503-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002504
2505New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002506-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002507
2508Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002509-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002510
2511Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002512-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002513
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002514- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2515
2516- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2517 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2518
2519- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2520 deleted at process exit time.
2521
2522- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2523 in backslash.
2524
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002525Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002527
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002528- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2529 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2530 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2531
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002532
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002533What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002534===========================
2535
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002536*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2537
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002538Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002539--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002540
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002541- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2542 been extensively updated. See
2543
2544 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2545
2546 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2547
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002548- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2549 deleted!
2550
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002551- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2552 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2553 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2554 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2555 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2556
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002557- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2558
2559 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2560 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2561
2562 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2563 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2564 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2565 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2566 supported anyway.
2567
2568 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2569 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2570
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002571- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2572 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2573 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2574 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2575 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002576
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002577- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2578 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2579 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2580
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002581Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002582-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002583
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002584- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2585 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2586 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2587 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2588 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2589 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002590 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2591 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2592 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2593 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002594
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002595- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2596 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2597 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2598
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002599Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002600-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002601
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002602- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2603
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002604Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002605-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002606
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002607- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2608 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2609 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2610 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2611 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2612 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2613
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002614- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2615
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002616- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2617
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002618- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2619
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002620- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2621 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2622 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2623
2624- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2625
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002626Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002627-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002628
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002629- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2630 off a search on Google.
2631
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002632Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002633-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002634
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002635- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2636 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2637 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2638 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2639 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2640 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2641 other platforms should do likewise.
2642
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002643- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2644 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2645 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2646
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002647C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002649
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002650- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2651 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2652 producing key-value pairs.
2653
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002654- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002655 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002656 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2657 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2658 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2659 previously went unchallenged.
2660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002661New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002662-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002663
2664Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002665-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002666
2667Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002668-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002669
2670Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002671----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002672
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002673- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2674 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002675
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002676- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2677 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2678 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2679 home.
2680
2681
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002682What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002683===========================
2684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002685*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2686
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002687Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002688--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002689
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002690- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2691 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002692
2693 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002694 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002695
2696 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2697 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002698 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002699 This needs to be documented.
2700
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002701- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2702 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2703
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002704- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2705 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2706 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2707
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002708- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2709 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2710
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002711- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2712 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2713 class forbids it).
2714
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002715- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2716 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2717 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2718
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002719- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2720
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002721Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002722-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002723
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002724- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2725 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002726 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002727
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002728- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2729 (like 1 + '').
2730
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002731Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002733
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002734- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2735 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2736 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2737 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002738 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002739 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2740
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002741- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2742 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2743 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2744 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2745
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002746- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2747 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002748 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2749 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2750 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002751
2752- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2753 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002754
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002755- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2756 bytes on its input.
2757
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002758Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002759-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002760
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002761- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002762 convenience function.
2763
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002764- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2765 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2766 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002767 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2768 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2769 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2770 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2771 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2772 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002773
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002774- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2775 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2776 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2777 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2778
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002779- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2780 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2781 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2782
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002783- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2784 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2785 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2786 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2787
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002788- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2789 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002790 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002791 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2792 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2793 new -l and -e options.
2794
2795- statcache is now deprecated.
2796
2797- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2798 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002800 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2801 time properly taken into account.
2802
2803- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2804 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2805 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2806 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002808Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002809-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002810
2811Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002813
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002814- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2815 is built with libdb3 if available.
2816
2817- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002819C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002820-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002821
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002822- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2823 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2824 PySequence_Size().
2825
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002826- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2827
2828- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2829 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2830 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2831
2832- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2833 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2834
2835- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2836 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2837
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002838New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002839-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002840
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002841- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2842 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2843
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002844- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2845 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2846
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002847- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002849Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002851
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002852- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2853 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002855Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002857
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002858Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002859----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002860
2861- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2862 removed completely in the next release.
2863
2864- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2865 OSX.
2866
2867- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2868 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2869
2870- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2871
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002872
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002873What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002874===========================
2875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2877
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002878Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002879--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002880
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002881- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002882 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002883 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002884 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2885 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002886 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2887 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002888 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2889 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002890
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002891- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2892 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2893
2894- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2895 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2896
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002897Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002898-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002899
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002900- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2901 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2902 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2903 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2904 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2905 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2906 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2907 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2908
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002909- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2910 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2911 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2912 example).
2913
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002914- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002915 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002916 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002917 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002918
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002919- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2920 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2921 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002922 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002923
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002924- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2925 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2926 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2927 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2928 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2929 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2930
2931 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2932
2933 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2934
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002935Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002937
2938- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2939
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002940- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2941
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002942- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2943 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002944
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002945- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2946 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2947 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2948 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2949 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2950 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002951 attributes.
2952
2953- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2954 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2955 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002956
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002957- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2958 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2959 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002960
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002961- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2962 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2963 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002964 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2965 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2966
2967- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2968 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002969
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002970Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002972
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002973- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2974 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2975
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002976- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2977 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2978 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2979 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2980
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002981- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2982 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2983 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2984 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2985
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002986 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2987 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2988 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2989 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2990 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2991 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2992 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2993 without losing information).
2994
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002995- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002996 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2997 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2998 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2999 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3000 module).
3001
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003002 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003003 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3004 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3005 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3006 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003007
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003008- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003009 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3010 encoding.
3011
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003012- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3013 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003015- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003016 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3017
3018- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3019 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3020 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3021 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3022
3023- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3024
3025- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3026 ON, and OFF.
3027
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003028- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3029 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3030
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003031Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003033
3034- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3035 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3036 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003037
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003038- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3039 been added: -X and -E.
3040
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003041Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003043
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003044- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3045 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3046
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003047C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003049
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003050- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3051 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3052 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3053 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3054 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3055
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003056- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3057 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3058 as long) arguments.
3059
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003060- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3061 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3062 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3063 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3064 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3065 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3066
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003067- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3068 input.
3069
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003070New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003072
3073Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003074-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003075
3076Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003078
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003079- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3080 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3081 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3082
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003083- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3084 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3085 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003086 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003087
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003088 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3089 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3090 import signal
3091 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003094 while 1:
3095 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003097 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3098 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3099 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3100 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003101
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003102
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003103What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3104===========================
3105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003106*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3107
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003108Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003110
3111- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3112 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3113 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3114
3115- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3116 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3117 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3118 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3119 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3120 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3121 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003122
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003123- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003124 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003125 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3126 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3127 associate a docstring with a property.
3128
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003129- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3130 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3131 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3132 other built-in object types.
3133
3134- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3135 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3136 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3137 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3138 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3139
3140- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3141 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3142
3143- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3144 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003145 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003146 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3147 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3148 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3149 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3150 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3151
3152- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3153 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3154 class.
3155
3156- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3157 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3158 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3159 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3160
3161- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3162 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3163 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3164 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3165
3166- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3167 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3168
3169- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3170 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3171 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3172 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3173 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003174 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003175 with the same value as s.
3176
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003177- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3178
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003179Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003181
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003182- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3183
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003184- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3185 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3186 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3187 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3188 objects.
3189
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003190- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3191 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003192 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3193 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3194
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003195- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3196 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3197 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3198
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003199Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003201
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003202- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3203 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3204 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3205 by the instances.
3206
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003207- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3208 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3209 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3210
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003211- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3212 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3213 before the entire comparison is complete.
3214
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003215- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3216 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3217 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3218
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003219- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3220 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3221 getwriter().
3222
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003223- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3224 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3225
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003226- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003227 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3228 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3229
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003230- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3231 iterable object.
3232
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003233- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3234 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003235
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003236- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3237 authentication.
3238
3239- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3240 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003241
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003242- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003243 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3244 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3245 a sample driver.)
3246
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003247Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003249
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003250- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3251 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3252 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3253 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3254 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3255 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3256 kernel has large file support.
3257
3258- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3259 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3260 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3261 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3262 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3263
3264- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3265 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3266 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3267
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003268C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003269-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003270
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003271- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3272 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003274New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003275-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003276
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003277- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3278 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3279
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003280Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003281-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003282
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003283- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3284 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3285 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3286 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3287 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3288
3289- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3290 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3291 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3292 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3293
3294- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3295 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3296
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003297Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003299
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003300- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003301 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3302 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003303
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003304
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003305What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3306===========================
3307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3309
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003310Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003312
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003313- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3314 big to represent as a C double.
3315
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003316- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3317 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3318 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3319 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3320 restriction).
3321
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003322- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3323 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3324 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3325 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3326 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3327
3328 >>> dir([])
3329 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3330 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3331 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3332 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3333 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3334 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3335 'reverse', 'sort']
3336
3337 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003339- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003340 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3341 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3342 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3343 OverflowError exception.
3344
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003345- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003346 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003347 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3348 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3349 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3350 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3351 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003352 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003353 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3354 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3355
3356 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3357 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3358 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3359 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003360
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003361- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003362 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3363 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3364 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3365 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3366 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3367 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3368 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3369 once it is created.
3370
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003371- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3372 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3373 (key, value) pairs.
3374
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003375- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003376 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3377 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3378
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003379- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3380 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3381 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3382 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3383 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003384
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003385- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003386 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3387 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3388
3389 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003391- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003392 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3393
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003394Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003396
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003397- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003398 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3399 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003400
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003401- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3402 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3403 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3404 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3405 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3406 in this area anymore).
3407
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003408- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3409 threading.Timer.
3410
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003411- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3412 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003414- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003415 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3416
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003417- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003418 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3419 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3420 converted to Python longs.
3421
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003422- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003423 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3424
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003425- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3426 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3427 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3428
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003429Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003431
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003432- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3433 division operators as per PEP 238.
3434
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003435Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003436-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003437
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003438- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3439 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3440 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3441 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3442
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003443C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003445
3446- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003447
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003448- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3449 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003450 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3453 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003454 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003456
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003457- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003458 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3459 module:
3460
3461 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003462
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003463 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3464 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003465
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003466 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3467 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003468
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003469 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3470
3471 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003473- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003474 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3475 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3476 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003478New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003480
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003481- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3482 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3483 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3484 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3485 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003486
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003487Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003489
3490Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003492
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003493- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3494 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3495 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3496 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003497 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3498 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3499 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3500 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3501 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003502
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003503- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003504 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003506
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003507What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3508===========================
3509
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3511
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003512Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003514
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003515- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3516 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3517
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003518- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3519 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3520 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003521
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003522- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3523 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3524 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3525 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003526
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003527- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003530
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003531Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003533
3534- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003535 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003536 the module docstring for details.
3537
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003538Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003540
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003541- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003542 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3543 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3544 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003545
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003546- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3547 Nick Mathewson.
3548
3549Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003551
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003552- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3553 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3554 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3555 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3556 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3557 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3558 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3559 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3560
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003561- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3562 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3563 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3564 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3565
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003566- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3567 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3568 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3569 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3570 come a long way).
3571
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003572- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3573 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3574 write filters for these warnings).
3575
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003576- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3577 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3578 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3579 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3580 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3581
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003582- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3583 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3584 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3585 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3586 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3587 older distribution.
3588
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003589Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003591
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003592- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3593 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003594 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003595
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003596- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3597 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3598 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3599
3600- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3601
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003602- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3603
3604- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3605
3606- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3607
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003609
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003610- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3611
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003612New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003614
3615C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003617
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003618- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3619 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3620 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3621 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3622 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3623 against buffer overruns.
3624
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003625- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003626 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3627 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003628 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3629 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3630 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3631
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003632- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3633 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3634 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3635 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3636 deprecated.
3637
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003638Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003640
3641- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3642 relevant is found.
3643
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003644
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003645What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003646===========================
3647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3649
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003650Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003652
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003653- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3654 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3655 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3656 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3657 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3658 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3659 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3660 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003661 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003662 repaired.
3663
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003664- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003665 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003666 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3667 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3668 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3669 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3670 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3671 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3672 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3673 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3674
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003675- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3676 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3677 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3678 leading BMO character).
3679
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003680- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3681 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3682 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3683
3684 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3685 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3686 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003687
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003688 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3689 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3690 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3691 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3692 for various simple to use conversions.
3693
3694 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3695 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3698 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3699 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3700 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3701 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3702 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3703 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3704 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3705 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3706 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3707 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3708 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3709 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3710 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3711 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003712
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003713- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3714 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3715 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003716 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003717 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003718
3719 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003720 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3721 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3722 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3723 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3724 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003725 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3726 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003727
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003728 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3729 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3730 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003731 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003732
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003733- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3734 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3735 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3736 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3737 floating arithmetic,
3738
3739 x = 9007199254740992.0
3740 print long(x)
3741
3742 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3743 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3744 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3745 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3746 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3747 functions are of good quality).
3748
3749 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3750 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3751 algorithms to break.
3752
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003753- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3754 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3755 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3756 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3757 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3758 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3759 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3760 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3761 order.
3762
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003763- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3764 operation along the most common code paths.
3765
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003766- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3767 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3768
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003769- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3770 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3771 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3772 {}.update(UserDict())
3773
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003774- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3775 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3776 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3777 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3778 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3779 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3780 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3781 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3782
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003783- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003784 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003786 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003787 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3788 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003789 join() method of strings
3790 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003791 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3792 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003794 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003795
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003796- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3797 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3798
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003799- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3800 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3801
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003802- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3803 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3804 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3805 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3806
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003807- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3808 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003809 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003810 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3811 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003812
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003813- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3814
3815
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003816Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003818
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003819- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003820 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003821 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3822 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3823
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003824- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3825 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3826
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003827- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3828 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3829 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3830 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3831
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003832- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3833 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3834 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3835
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003836- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3837
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003838- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3839
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003840- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3841 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3842 that are still imported into string.py).
3843
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003844- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3845
3846- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3847 Now it does.
3848
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003849- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3850
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003851- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3852 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3853 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3854 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3855 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003856 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3857 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003858
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003859- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3860 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3861 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3862 'help(object)'.
3863
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003864Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003866
3867- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003868 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003869 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3870 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3871
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003872- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003873 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3874 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003875
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003876C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003878
3879- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3880 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881
3882----
3883
3884**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**