blob: 507c7a5cd4a327ab51cad24590bddbae4128abda [file] [log] [blame]
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
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
16PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
17
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
19 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
20 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
22- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
23 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
26Extension modules
27-----------------
28
29Library
30-------
31
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000032- Bug #979794: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the case of when it is
33 comparing two empty lists. Was affecting both context_diff() and
34 unified_diff(). Was also a duplicate of bug #980117.
35
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000036- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
37
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000038- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
39 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
40 AM Kuchling.
41
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000042- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
43 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
44 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
45
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000046- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
47 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
48 instead of unsigned.
49
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000050- decimal.py now only uses signals in the spec. The other conditions are
51 no longer part of the public API.
52
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000053- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
54 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
55 string methods of the same name).
56
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000057- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
58 SF patch 982681.
59
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000060- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
61 SF patch 945642.
62
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000063Tools/Demos
64-----------
65
66Build
67-----
68
69C API
70-----
71
72New platforms
73-------------
74
75Tests
76-----
77
78Windows
79-------
80
81Mac
82---
83
84
85
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000086What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
87=================================
88
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +000089*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000090
91Core and builtins
92-----------------
93
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000094- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
95 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
96 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
97 objects now (one object instead of three).
98
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000099- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
100 Windows DLLs.
101
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000102- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
103
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000104- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
105 a new .pyc magic.
106
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000107- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
108 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
109 be there.
110
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000111- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
112 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
113 the LC_NUMERIC category.
114
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000115- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
116 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
117 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
118
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000119- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
120
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000121- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
122 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
123 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000124
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000125- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
126 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
127
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000128- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
129
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000130- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000131 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000132
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000133- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
134
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000135- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
136
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000137- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
138 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
139
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000140- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
141 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
142 Fixes bug #858016 .
143
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000144- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
145 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
146 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
147
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000148- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
149 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
150 improves their performance (about 35%).
151
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000152- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
153 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
154 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
155
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000156- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
157 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
158 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
159 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
160
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000161- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
162 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
163 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
164 length is not known).
165
166- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
167 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000168 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
169 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000170 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
171
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000172- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
173 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
174
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000175- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
176 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
177 keyword arguments.
178
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000179- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
180 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
181 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
182
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000183- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
184 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
185 cases.
186
187- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
188 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
189 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
190 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
191 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
192 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
193 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
194 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
195 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
196 a release build.
197
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000198- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
199 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
200
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000201- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000202 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000203
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000204- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
205 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
206 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
207 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
208 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
209 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
210 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
211 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
212 destroyed.
213
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000214- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
215 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
216 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
217 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
218 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
219 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
220 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
221 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
222
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000223- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
224 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
225 character other than a space.
226
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000227- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
228 by the function object or by the method object, the function
229 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
230 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
231 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
232 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
233 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
234 attributes with the same name.
235
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000236- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
237 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
238 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
239 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
240 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
241 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
242 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
243 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
244 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
245 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
246 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
247 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
248 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
249 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000250
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000251- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
252 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
253 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
254 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
255 This has been repaired.
256
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000257- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
258
259- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
260
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000261- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
262 over a sequence.
263
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000264- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000265 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000266
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000267- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
268
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000269- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
270 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
271 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
272 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
273 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
274 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
275 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
276 records with equal keys is unchanged).
277
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000278- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
279 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
280 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
281
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000282- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
283 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
284 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
285 freelist.
286
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000287- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
288 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
289
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000290- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
291 number.
292
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000293- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
294 a TypeError exception.
295
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000296- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
297 820195.
298
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000299- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
300 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
301 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
302
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000303- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000304 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
305 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000306
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000307- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
308 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
309 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
310
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000311- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
312 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000313 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000314
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000315- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000316 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
317 the first call.
318
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000319
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000320Extension modules
321-----------------
322
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000323- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
324 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
325
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000326- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
327 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
328 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
329 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
330 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
331 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
332 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000333
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000334- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
335
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000336- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
337
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000338- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
339 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
340
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000341- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
342 fewer false positives.
343
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000344- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
345 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
346
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000347- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000348 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
349
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000350- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000351 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000352 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
353 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
354 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000355
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000356- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
357 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
358 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
359 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
360
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000361- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
362 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
363 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
364 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
365 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
366 #897625.
367
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000368- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
369 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
370
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000371- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
372 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
373 and pops on either side of the deque.
374
375- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
376 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
377
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000378- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
379 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
380 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
381 other functions that expect a function argument.
382
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000383- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
384
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000385- os.getsid was added.
386
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000387- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
388 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
389 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
390
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000391- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
392
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000393- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
394
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000395- readline.clear_history was added.
396
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000397- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
398
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000399- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
400
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000401- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
402
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000403- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
404
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000405- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
406
407- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
408
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000409- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
410
411- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
412
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000413- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
414 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
415 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
416
417- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
418 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
419 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
420 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
421 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
422 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
423 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
424
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000425- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
426 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
427 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
428 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000429
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000430- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000431 iterators from a single iterable.
432
433- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
434 of raising a TypeError exception.
435
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000436- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
437 as parameter.
438
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000439Library
440-------
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000441
442- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
443 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
444 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000445
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000446- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
447 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
448 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000449
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000450- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000451
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000452- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
453 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000454
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000455- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
456 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
457
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000458- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
459
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000460- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000461 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000462
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000463- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
464 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
465
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000466- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
467
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000468- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
469 on cygwin and mingw32.
470
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000471- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
472
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000473- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
474 module.
475
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000476- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
477 installation scheme for all platforms.
478
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000479- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000480 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000481
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000482- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
483 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
484 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
485
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000486- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
487 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
488 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
489
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000490- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
491
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000492- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
493
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000494- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
495 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
496
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000497- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
498 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
499 type pattern with the same value exists.
500
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000501- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
502 when run from the command prompt).
503
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000504- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
505 not taken into consideration when caching value.
506
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000507- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
508 default sort).
509
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000510- Added global runctx function to profile module
511
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000512- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
513
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000514- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
515
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000516- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
517
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000518- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000519 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
520 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
521 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
522 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
523 accordingly.
524
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000525- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
526 decoding standards.
527
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000528- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
529 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
530 called for all requests.
531
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000532- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
533 they are passed to the compiler.
534
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000535- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
536 indent, width and depth.
537
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000538- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
539 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
540
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000541- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
542 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
543
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000544- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
545
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000546- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
547
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000548- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
549
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000550- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
551 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
552
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000553- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000554 for better performance.
555
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000556- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000557
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000558- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
559 a string).
560
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000561- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
562
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000563- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
564
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000565- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
566
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000567- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
568
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000569- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
570 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
571 list of fieldnames.
572
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000573- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
574 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
575
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000576- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
577
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000578- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
579 empty lists.
580
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000581- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
582 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
583 and shelves.
584
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000585- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
586 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
587
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000588- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000589 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
590 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000591
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000592- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
593 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000594 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000595
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000596- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000597 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
598 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
599
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000600- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
601 and removed in Py2.4.
602
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000603- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
604
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000605- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
606
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000607Tools/Demos
608-----------
609
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000610- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
611 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
612
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000613- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
614
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000615- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
616 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
617 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
618 destination in situations where both files are given.
619
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000620- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
621 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
622 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
623 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
624
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000625- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
626
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000627- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
628 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
629 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
630 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
631 now.
632
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000633- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
634 in effect
635
636- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
637 C-c C-h
638
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000639- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
640 -d option was given.
641
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000642Build
643-----
644
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000645- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
646 build under OS X.
647
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000648- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
649 --enable-profiling.
650
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000651- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
652 is configured --with-tsc.
653
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000654- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
655 on AMD64.
656
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000657- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
658 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
659
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000660- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
661 removed.
662
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000663- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
664 supported (see PEP 11).
665
666- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
667
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000668- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
669
670- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
671 (see PEP 11).
672
673- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
674 sizeof(char) must be 1.
675
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000676C API
677-----
678
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000679- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
680 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
681 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
682
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000683- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
684 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
685 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
686 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
687
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000688- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
689 generator objects.
690
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000691- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
692 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000693 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
694 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000695
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000696- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
697 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
698
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000699- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
700 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
701 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
702 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
703 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
704
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000705- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
706 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
707 about 10% faster.
708
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000709- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
710 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
711
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000712- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
713 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
714 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
715 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
716
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000717Windows
718-------
719
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000720- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
721 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
722 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
723 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
724
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000725- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
726 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
727 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
728
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000729
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000730What's New in Python 2.3 final?
731===============================
732
733*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
734
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000735IDLE
736----
737
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000738- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
739 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
740 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
741 context-menu actions.
742
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000743- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
744 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
745 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
746 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
747 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
748 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
749 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
750 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
751 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
752
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000753
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000754What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
755=============================================
756
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000757*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000758
759Core and builtins
760-----------------
761
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000762- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000763 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000764 comment at the end are still unsupported.
765
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000766Extension modules
767-----------------
768
769- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
770 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
771 than once. This has been fixed.
772
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000773- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
774 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
775 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
776 call.
777
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000778- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
779
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000780Library
781-------
782
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000783- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
784 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
785
786- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
787 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
788 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
789 restored.
790
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000791IDLE
792----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000793
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000794- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000795
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000796Build
797-----
798
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000799- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
800 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
801
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000802C API
803-----
804
805Windows
806-------
807
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000808- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
809 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
810
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000811- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
812
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000813Mac
814---
815
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000816- Various fixes to pimp.
817
818- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
819
820- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
821 more problems than it solves.
822
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000823
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000824What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
825=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000826
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000827*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
828
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000829Core and builtins
830-----------------
831
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000832- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
833 by sys.setcheckinterval().
834
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000835- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
836 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000837 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000838
839- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
840 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
841 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000842 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000843
844- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
845 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000846
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000847- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
848 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
849 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
850
851- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000852 770247.
853
854- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000855
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000856Extension modules
857-----------------
858
859- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
860 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
861
862- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
863
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000864- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
865
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000866- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
867 contained within the _strptime module.
868
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000869- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
870 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
871
872- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000873 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
874
875- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
876 the find_class attribute, if present.
877
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000878- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000879
880 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
881 (SF bug 763298).
882
883 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000884 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
885 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
886 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000887
888 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
889
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000890Library
891-------
892
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000893- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
894
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000895- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
896 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
897 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
898 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
899 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
900 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
901 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
902 or Tester().
903
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000904- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
905 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
906 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
907 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
908 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
909 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
910 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
911 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
912 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000913
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000914 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000915
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000916- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
917 weren't before was an oversight.
918
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000919- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
920 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
921
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000922- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
923 when there are no lines.
924
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000925- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
926 which could occur with Tk 8.4
927
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000928- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
929 to child processes.
930
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000931- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
932
933- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
934
935- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
936 xmlrpclib.
937
938- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
939 responses.
940
941- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
942 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
943
944- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
945 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
946 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
947
948- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
949 used as patterns.
950
951- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
952 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
953 than Tk 8.3.
954
955- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
956
957- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000958
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000959Tools/Demos
960-----------
961
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000962- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
963
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000964- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
965
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000966- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000967
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000968Build
969-----
970
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000971- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
972
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000973- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
974
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000975- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
976 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000977
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000978- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
979 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
980 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000981
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000982C API
983-----
984
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000985- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
986 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
987
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000988Windows
989-------
990
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000991- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
992 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
993 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
994 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
995 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
996 Python exception ::
997
998 thread.error: can't start new thread
999
1000 is raised now.
1001
1002- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1003 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1004 instead of from DLL teardown.
1005
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001006Mac
1007---
1008
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001009- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001010 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001011 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1012 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1013 the executable in the bundle.
1014
1015- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001016
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001017- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1018
1019- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1020 on Panther.
1021
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001022What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1023================================
1024
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001025*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001026
1027Core and builtins
1028-----------------
1029
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001030- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1031 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1032 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1033 with the -i option.
1034
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001035- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1036 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1037
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001038- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1039 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1040
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001041- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1042 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1043 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1044 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1045 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1046 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1047 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1048 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1049 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1050 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1051 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1052 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1053 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001054
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001055- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1056 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1057 embedded in a lambda expression.
1058
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001059- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1060 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1061 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1062 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1063 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1064
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001065- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1066 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1067 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1068
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001069- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1070 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1071
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001072- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1073 It's writable again.
1074
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001075- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1076 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1077 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001078 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001079
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001080- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1081 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1082 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1083
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001084Extension modules
1085-----------------
1086
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001087- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1088 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1089
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001090- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1091 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1092 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1093 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1094
1095- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1096 collection.
1097
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001098- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1099 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1100 unique within a single program run.
1101
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001102- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1103 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1104
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001105- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1106 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1107
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001108- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1109 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001110
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001111- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1112
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001113- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1114 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1115
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001116- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1117 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1118 for many BSD-derived systems.
1119
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001120
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001121Library
1122-------
1123
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001124- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1125 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1126 primary ones:
1127
1128 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1129 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1130 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1131
1132 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1133 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1134 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1135 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1136 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1137 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1138
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001139- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1140 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1141 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1142 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1143 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1144 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1145 argument.
1146
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001147- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1148 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1149 in the archive.
1150
1151- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1152 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1153
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001154- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1155 569574).
1156
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001157- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1158 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1159 no more.
1160
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001161- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1162 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1163 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1164 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1165 code coverage.
1166
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001167- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1168 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1169 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001170 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1171 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001172
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001173- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1174 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1175 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001176 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001177
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001178- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1179
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001180- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1181 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1182 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1183 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1184
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001185- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1186 handling.
1187
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001188- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1189 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1190
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001191- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1192 in socket.py.
1193
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001194- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1195
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001196- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1197 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1198 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1199 opener with proxy support.
1200
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001201- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1202
1203- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1204
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001205Tools/Demos
1206-----------
1207
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001208- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1209
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001210- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1211
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001212- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1213 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001214
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001215- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1216 files.
1217
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001218Build
1219-----
1220
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001221- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001222 different root directory.
1223
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001224C API
1225-----
1226
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001227- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1228 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1229 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1230 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1231 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1232 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1233 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1234 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1235 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1236 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1237
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001238- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1239 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1240 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1241 from Python.
1242
1243
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001244New platforms
1245-------------
1246
1247None this time.
1248
1249Tests
1250-----
1251
1252- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1253 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1254
1255Windows
1256-------
1257
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001258- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1259
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001260- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1261 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1262 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1263 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1264 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1265 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1266 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1267 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1268 that's what it's for.
1269
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001270Mac
1271---
1272
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001273- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1274 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1275 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1276 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001277- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1278 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1279- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001280
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001281SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1282------------------------------------
1283
1284430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1285598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1286622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1287661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1288683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1289697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1290713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1291724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1292727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1293729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1294730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1295731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1296732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1297733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1298735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1299740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1300744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1301745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1302747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1303749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1304751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1305753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1306755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1307757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1308760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1309
1310
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001311What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1312================================
1313
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001314*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001315
1316Core and builtins
1317-----------------
1318
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001319- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1320 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1321
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001322- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1323 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1324 and cannot be strings).
1325
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001326- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1327 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1328 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1329 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1330
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001331- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1332 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1333 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1334 Python itself.
1335
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001336- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1337 the referenced object, if it has one.
1338
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001339- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1340 the thread started at
1341 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1342
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001343- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1344 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1345 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1346 placed on a list index.
1347
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001348- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1349 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1350 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1351 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1352
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001353- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1354 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1355 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1356 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1357 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1358 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1359 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1360
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001361- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1362 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1363 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1364 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1365 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1366
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001367- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1368 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001369
1370- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1371 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1372 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1373 #693195.)
1374
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001375- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1376 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001377
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001378- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001379 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001380 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1381 interpreter executions, would fail.
1382
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001383- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001384 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001385 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001386
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001387Extension modules
1388-----------------
1389
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001390- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1391 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1392 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1393 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1394
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001395- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1396 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1397
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001398- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1399 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1400 and Greg Chapman.)
1401
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001402- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1403 recursively.
1404
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001405- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001406 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1407 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1408 leaks.
1409
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001410- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1411
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001412- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1413 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1414 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1415 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1416 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1417 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1418 #705836.
1419
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001420- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001421 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1422
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001423- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1424 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1425 See SF bug #692416.
1426
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001427- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1428 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1429
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001430- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1431 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1432 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001433
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001434- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001435 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1436 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1437
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001438- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1439 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1440 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1441 timeouts to work properly.
1442
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001443Library
1444-------
1445
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001446- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1447 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1448 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1449 future release.
1450
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001451- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1452 for querying platform dependent features.
1453
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001454- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001455
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001456- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1457 pickle protocol versions.
1458
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001459- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1460 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1461 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1462
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001463- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1464
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001465- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1466 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1467 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1468 modules.
1469
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001470- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1471 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1472 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1473
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001474- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1475 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1476
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001477- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1478 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1479 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1480
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001481- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001482 MS Office extensions.
1483
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001484- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1485 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1486
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001487- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1488 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1489
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001490- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1491 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1492 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1493 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1494 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1495 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1496
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001497- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1498 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1499 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001500
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001501- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1502 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1503 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1504
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001505- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1506
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001507- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1508 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1509 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1510
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001511Tools/Demos
1512-----------
1513
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001514- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1515 See the module docstring for details.
1516
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001517Build
1518-----
1519
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001520- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1521 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001522
1523C API
1524-----
1525
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001526- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1527
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001528- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1529 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1530 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1531
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001532- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1533 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001534
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001535 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1536 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1537 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001538
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001539- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001540 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1541
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001542- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1543 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1544 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001545
1546New platforms
1547-------------
1548
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001549None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001550
1551Tests
1552-----
1553
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001554- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1555 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001556
1557Windows
1558-------
1559
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001560- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1561 function.
1562
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001563- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1564 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001565
1566Mac
1567---
1568
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001569- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1570 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001571
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001572- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1573 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001574
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001575- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1576 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1577 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001578
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001579- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001580 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1581 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001582
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001583- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1584 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001585
1586
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001587What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1588=================================
1589
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001590*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001591
1592Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001593-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001594
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001595- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1596 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1597 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1598
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001599- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1600 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1601 (SF patch #664376.)
1602
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001603- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1604 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1605 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1606 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1607 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1608 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001609 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001610
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001611- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1612 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1613 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1614 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001615 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001616
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001617- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1618 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1619 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1620 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1621 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1622 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1623 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1624 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1625 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1626 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1627 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1628
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001629- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1630 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1631 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1632 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1633 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1634 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1635
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001636- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1637 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1638
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001639- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1640 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1641 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1642 case.)
1643
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001644- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1645 passed as unicode strings.
1646
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001647- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1648 See SF bug #683467.
1649
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001650- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1651 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1652
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001653- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1654
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001655- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1656
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001657- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1658 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1659 arguments.
1660
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001661- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1662 See SF bug #667147.
1663
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001664- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001665 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001666 See SF bug #676155.
1667
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001668- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001669 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001670 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1671 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1672 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1673 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1674 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1675 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001676
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001677Extension modules
1678-----------------
1679
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001680- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1681 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1682 tp_as_number pointer.
1683
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001684- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1685 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1686 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1687 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1688 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1689
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001690- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1691
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001692- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1693
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001694- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001695 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001696 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1697 patch #678531.)
1698
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001699- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1700 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1701
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001702- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1703 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1704
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001705- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1706
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001707- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1708 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1709 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1710
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001711- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1712
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001713- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1714 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1715
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001716- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001717
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001718- datetime changes:
1719
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001720 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1721
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001722 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1723 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1724 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1725 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1726 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1727 now.
1728
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001729 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001730 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1731 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001732
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001733 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001734 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001735 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1736 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1737 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1738 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001739
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001740 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1741 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1742 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001743 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1744
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001745 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1746 by a later example coded by Guido.
1747
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001748 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001749 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1750 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1751 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001752 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1753 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1754
1755 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1756 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1757 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1758 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1759 tzinfo subclass instance.
1760
1761 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1762 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1763 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1764 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1765 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1766 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1767 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1768 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001769
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001770 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1771 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1772 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1773 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1774 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001775 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1776
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001777 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001778
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001779 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1780 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1781 as a naive datetime object.
1782
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001783 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1784 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1785 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1786
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001787 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1788 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1789 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1790 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1791 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1792 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1793 comparison.
1794
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001795 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1796 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1797 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1798 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001799 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001800
1801 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001802
1803 and ::
1804
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001805 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1806
1807 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1808 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1809 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1810 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1811
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001812 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1813 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1814 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1815 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1816 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1817
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001818 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1819 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001820 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1821 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001822
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001823Library
1824-------
1825
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001826- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1827 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1828
1829- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1830 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1831 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1832 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1833 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1834 See PEP 307 for details.
1835
1836- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1837 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1838
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001839- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1840 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001841 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001842 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1843 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001844 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001845
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001846- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1847 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1848
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001849- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1850 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1851 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1852
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001853- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1854
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001855- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1856 exception.
1857
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001858- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1859 class.
1860
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001861- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1862 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1863 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1864
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001865- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1866 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1867
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001868- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001869 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1870 See SF bug #659228.
1871
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001872- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1873 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1874 See SF patch #651082.
1875
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001876- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001877
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001878- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1879 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1880
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001881- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001882 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001883
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001884- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1885 DOS paths from other platforms.
1886
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001887Tools/Demos
1888-----------
1889
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001890- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1891 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1892 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1893 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1894 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1895 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1896 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1897 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1898 example:
1899
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001900 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1901 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001902
1903 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1904
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001905
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001906Build
1907-----
1908
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001909- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1910 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1911 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001912 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1913
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001914 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1915
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001916- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1917 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1918 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1919 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1920 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1921 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1922 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1923 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1924 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1925
1926- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1927 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1928 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1929 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1930
1931- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1932 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1933
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001934C API
1935-----
1936
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001937- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1938 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001939
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001940- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1941 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1942 tp_as_number pointer.
1943
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001944- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1945 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1946 (SF #681367)
1947
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001948- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1949 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1950 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1951 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001952
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001953Tests
1954-----
1955
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001956- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001957 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1958 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1959 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1960 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1961 pydoc.)
1962
1963- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1964
1965- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001966
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001967Windows
1968-------
1969
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001970- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1971 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1972 time).
1973
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001974- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1975 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1976
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001977- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1978 release without strong cryptography.
1979
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001980- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001981 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001982
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001983- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1984 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1985
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001986Mac
1987---
1988
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001989- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1990 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001991
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001992- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1993 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1994 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001995
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001996- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1997 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001998
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001999- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2000 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2001 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2002 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002003
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002004- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002005 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2006 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2007 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002008
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002010What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002011=================================
2012
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002013*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002014
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002015Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002017
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002018- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2019
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002020- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2021 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002022 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002023 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002024 a different meaning than before.
2025
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002026- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002027 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002028 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002029
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002030- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002031 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002032 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002033
2034- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2035 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2036 and deallocation.
2037
2038- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2039 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2040
2041- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2042 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2043 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2044 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2045 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2046
2047- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2048 now detected by the garbage collector.
2049
2050- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2051 [SF bug 519621]
2052
2053- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2054 identifier.
2055
2056- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2057 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2058 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2059 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2060 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2061 [SF bug 563060]
2062
2063- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2064 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2065 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2066 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2067 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2068
2069- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2070 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2071 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2072
2073- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2074
2075- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2076 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2077 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2078 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2079 state of the slots would be lost.)
2080
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002081Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002082-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002083
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002084- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002085 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2086 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2087 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2088 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002089 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2090 Jython 2.1.
2091
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002092- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002093 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002094 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2095 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2096 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2097 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2098 these, see PEP 302.
2099
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002100- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2101 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2102 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2103
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002104- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2105 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2106 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2107
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002108- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2109 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2110 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2111
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002112- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2113 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2114 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2115 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2116 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2117 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2118 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2119 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2120 releases or implementations.
2121
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002122- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002123 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2124 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002125
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002126- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2127 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2128
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002129- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2130 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2131 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2132
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002133- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2134 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2135
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002136- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2137 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002138 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2139 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002140
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002141- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2142 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2143 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2144 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2145 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2146
2147 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2148 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2149 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2150 pattern.
2151
2152 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2153 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2154 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2155 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2156
2157 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2158 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2159 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2160 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2161 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2162 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2163
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002164- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2165 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2166 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2167 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2168 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2169 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2170 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2171 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002172
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002173- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2174 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2175 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2176 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2177 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002178 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2179 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2180 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2181 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2182 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2183 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2184 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002185
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002186- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2187 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2188
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002189- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2190 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2191 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2192 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2193 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2194 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2195 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2196 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2197 to Zack Weinberg!
2198
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002199- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2200 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2201 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2202 type. This has been fixed now.
2203
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002204- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2205 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2206 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2207
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002208- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2209 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2210 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2211 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2212 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2213 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2214 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2215 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002216 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002217
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002218- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2219 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2220 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002221
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002222- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2223 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2224 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2225 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2226 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2227 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2228 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2229 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002230 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002231 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2232 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2233
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002234- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2235 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2236 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2237 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2238 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2239 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2240 this.)
2241
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002242- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2243 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002244 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002245 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002246 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2247 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002248 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2249 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002250
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002251- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2252 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2253 currently running.
2254
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002255- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2256 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2257 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2258 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2259
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002260- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2261 as directory names.
2262
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002263- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2264 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2265
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002266- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2267 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2268
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002269- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002270 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2271 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002272
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002273- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2274 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2275 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2276 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2277 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2278
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002279- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2280 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2281 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2282 removed.
2283
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002284- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2285 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2286 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2287
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002288- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2289 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2290 to __debug__.
2291
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002292- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2293 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2294 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2295
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002296- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2297 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2298 deprecated now.
2299
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002300- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2301 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2302 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002303
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002304- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2305 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2306 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2307 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2308 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002309
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002310- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2311 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2312
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002313- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2314 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2315 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002316 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002317 is backward compatible.
2318
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002319- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2320 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2321 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2322 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2323 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2324
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002325- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2326 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2327 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2328 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2329 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2330 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002331
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002332- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2333 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2334
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002335- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2336 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2337
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002338- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2339 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2340 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2341 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2342 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2343
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002344- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2345 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2346 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2347
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002348- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002349 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2350
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002351- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2352 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2353 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002354
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002355- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2356 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2357
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002358- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2359 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2360 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2361
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002362- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2363
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002364Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002366
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002367- Added three operators to the operator module:
2368 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2369 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2370 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2371
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002372- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2373
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002374- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2375 archives.
2376
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002377- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2378 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2379 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2380
2381 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2382
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002383- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2384 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2385 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002386 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002387
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002388- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2389 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2390 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2391 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002392 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2393 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2394 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2395 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002396
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002397- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2398 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002399
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002400- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2401
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002402- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2403 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2404
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002405- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2406 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2407 supported.
2408
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002409- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2410
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002411- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2412 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002413
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002414- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2415 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2416
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002417- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2418
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002419- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2420 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2421
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002422- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2423 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2424 functions but callable type objects.
2425
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002426- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002427 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002428 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002429
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002430- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2431 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002432
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002433- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2434 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002435
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002436- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2437 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2438 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2439 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2440
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002441- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2442 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002443
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002444- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2445 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2446 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2447 and __imul__.
2448
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002449- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002450 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2451 is called.
2452
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002453- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2454 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2455 interpreter was compiled.
2456
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002457- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2458 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2459 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002460 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002461 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2462 1, not 2.
2463
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002464- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2465 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2466 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2467 limit.
2468
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002469- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2470 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2471 bug #623464.
2472
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002473- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2474 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2475 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2476 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2477
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002478Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002479-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002480
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002481- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2482
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002483- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2484 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2485 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2486 with Python 2.3a2.
2487
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002488- os.path exposes getctime.
2489
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002490- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002491 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002492 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002493 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002494 unit tests of floating point results.
2495
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002496- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2497 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2498 has been increased.
2499
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002500- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2501 executed.
2502
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002503- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2504 postinstallation script.
2505
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002506- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2507 test the current module.
2508
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002509- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002510 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2511 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2512 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2513 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2514
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002515- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002516 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002517 Ward's Optik package.
2518
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002519- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2520 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2521 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2522 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2523
2524- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2525 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002526 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002527
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002528- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2529 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2530 shelf are binary pickles.
2531
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002532- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2533 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2534
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002535- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2536 modules are iterators now.
2537
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002538- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2539 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2540 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2541 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2542 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2543 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002544
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002545- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2546 with their entity value.
2547
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002548- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2549
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002550- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2551 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002552
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002553- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2554 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002555 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002556
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002557- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2558 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2559 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2560 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2561 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2562 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2563 main():
2564
2565 import locale
2566 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2567
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002568- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2569 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2570
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002571- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2572 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2573 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2574 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2575 to the new standard.
2576
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002577- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2578 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2579 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2580 an extension to the database.
2581
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002582- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2583 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2584 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2585 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002586 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002587
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002588- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002589 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002590
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002591- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2592 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2593 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2594 bounded integers.
2595
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002596- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2597 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2598 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2599 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2600 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2601 in existence.
2602
2603 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2604 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2605 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2606 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2607 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2608 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2609
2610 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2611 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2612 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2613 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2614
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002615- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2616 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2617 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2618
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002619- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2620
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002621- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2622 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2623 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2624 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2625
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002626- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2627 argument.
2628
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002629- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2630 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2631 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2632 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2633 [SF patch 560794].
2634
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002635- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2636 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2637 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002638 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2639 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2640 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002641
2642- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2643 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002644
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002645- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2646 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2647 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2648 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002649
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002650- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2651 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2652 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2653 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2654 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2655
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002656- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002657
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002658- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2659
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002660- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2661 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2662 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2663 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2664 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2665 identical to None.
2666
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002667- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2668 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2669 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2670 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2671 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2672 results now.
2673
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002674- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2675 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2676
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002677- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2678 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2679 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2680 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2681 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2682 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2683 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2684 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2685
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002686- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2687
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002688- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2689 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2690
2691- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2692 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2693 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2694 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2695 and other systems.
2696
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002697- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2698 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2699 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2700 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 +00002701 work well with these.
2702
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002703- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2704
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002705- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002706 connections.
2707
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002708- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2709 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2710 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2711
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002712- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2713 sets
2714
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002715- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2716 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2717 name.
2718
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002719- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2720 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2721 passed in.
2722
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002723- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002724 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002725 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2726 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002727
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002728- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2729
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002730- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2731
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002732- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2733 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2734 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2735
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002736- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2737 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2738 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2739 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002740 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002741
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002742- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002743 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002744 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002745
2746- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2747 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2748 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2749
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002750- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002751 the value of its expression argument.
2752
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002753- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2754 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2755 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2756
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002757- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2758 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2759 skipstone browser was included.
2760
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002761- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2762 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002764Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002766
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002767- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2768 names in addition to accepting file names.
2769
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002770- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2771 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2772 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2773 still used and useful.)
2774
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002775- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2776 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2777 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2778 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002779
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002780- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2781 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2782 the generated binary.
2783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002784Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002786
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002787- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2788
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002789- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2790 except in the hands of experts.
2791
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002792- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002793 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2794 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2795 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002796
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002797- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2798 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2799 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2800 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2801 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2802 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2803 builds.
2804
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002805- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2806 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2807 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2808 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2809 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2810 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2811 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2812 new type.
2813
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002814- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002815
2816 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2817 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2818 positive infinities.
2819
2820 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2821 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2822 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2823 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2824 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2825 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2826 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2827
2828 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2829
2830 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2831
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002832- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2833 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2834 size of the executable.
2835
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002836- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2837 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2838 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2839 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002840
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002841- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2842
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002843- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2844 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2845 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002846
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002847- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2848 well as Unix.
2849
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002850- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2851 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2852 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2853 modules in the README file for details.
2854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002855C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002857
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002858- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2859 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002860 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002861 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002862 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002863
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002864- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2865 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2866 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2867 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2868 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2869 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002870 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002871 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2872 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2873 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2874 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2875 aligned.)
2876
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002877- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2878 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2879 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2880
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002881- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2882 level.
2883
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002884- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2885 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2886 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2887 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2888 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2889
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002890- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2891 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2892 code.
2893
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002894- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2895 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2896 adjusting for negative indices.
2897
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002898- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2899 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2900 object.
2901
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002902- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2903 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2904 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2905
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002906- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2907 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002908
2909- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2910
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002911- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2912 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2913 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2914 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2915
2916- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2917
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002918- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002919
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002920- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002921 without going through the buffer API.
2922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002924
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002925- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2926 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2927 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2928 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2929
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002930- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2931 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2932
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002933- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002934 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2935
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002936New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002938
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002939- OpenVMS is now supported.
2940
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002941- AtheOS is now supported.
2942
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002943- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2944
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002945- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2946
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002947Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-----
2949
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002950- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2951 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2952 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002953
2954Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002956
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002957- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2958 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2959 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2960 bugs.
2961 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002962 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002963 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2964 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002965 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002966
2967- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002968 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002969
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002970- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2971 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2972
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002973- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2974 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002975 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002976 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2977
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002978- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2979 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2980 use files" uninstall option).
2981
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002982- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2983
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002984- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2985 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2986
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002987- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2988 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2989 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2990
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002991- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2992 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2993 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2994 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2995 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002996 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2997 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2998 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002999
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003000- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003001 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003002 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3003 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3004 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3005 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3006 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3007 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3008 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3009 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3010 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3011 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3012 work around.
3013
3014- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3015 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3016 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3017 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3018 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3019 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3020 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3021 specified with O_CREAT too).
3022
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003023Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003024----
3025
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003026- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003027
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003028- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3029 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3030 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3031
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003032- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3033 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3034 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3035
3036- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3037 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3038 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3039 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3040 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3041 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3042 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3043 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003044
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003045- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3046 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3047 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003048
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003049- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3050 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3051 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3052 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3053 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003054
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003055- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3056 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3057 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003058
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003059- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3060 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003061
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003062- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3063 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3064 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3065 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3066 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003067
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003068- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3069 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3070 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3071
3072- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3073 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3074 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003075
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003076- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3077 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3078 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3079 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003080 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003081
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003082- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3083 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003084
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003085- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3086 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003087
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003088- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003089 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003090 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3091 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003092
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003093
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003094What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003095===============================
3096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3098
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003099Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003100--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003101
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003102- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3103 with a custom metaclass.
3104
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003105Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003106-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003107
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003108- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3109 are proxies.
3110
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003111Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003113
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003114- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3115 very short strings.
3116
3117- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3118 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3119 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3120 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3121 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3122
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003123Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003125
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003126- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3127 close or delete time).
3128
3129- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3130 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3131
3132- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3133
3134- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003135 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003136
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003137Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003139
3140Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003142
3143C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003145
3146New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003148
3149Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003151
3152Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003154
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003155- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3156
3157- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3158 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3159
3160- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3161 deleted at process exit time.
3162
3163- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3164 in backslash.
3165
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003166Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003168
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003169- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3170 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3171 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3172
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003173
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003174What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003175===========================
3176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3178
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003179Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003181
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003182- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3183 been extensively updated. See
3184
3185 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3186
3187 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3188
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003189- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3190 deleted!
3191
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003192- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3193 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3194 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3195 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3196 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3197
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003198- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3199
3200 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3201 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3202
3203 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3204 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3205 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3206 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3207 supported anyway.
3208
3209 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3210 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3211
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003212- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3213 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3214 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3215 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3216 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003217
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003218- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3219 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3220 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3221
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003222Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003224
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003225- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3226 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3227 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3228 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3229 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3230 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003231 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3232 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3233 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3234 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003235
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003236- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3237 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3238 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3239
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003240Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003242
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003243- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3244
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003245Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003247
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003248- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3249 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3250 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3251 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3252 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3253 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3254
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003255- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3256
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003257- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3258
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003259- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3260
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003261- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3262 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3263 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3264
3265- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3266
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003267Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003269
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003270- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3271 off a search on Google.
3272
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003273Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003275
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003276- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3277 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3278 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3279 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3280 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3281 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3282 other platforms should do likewise.
3283
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003284- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3285 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3286 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3287
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003288C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003290
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003291- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3292 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3293 producing key-value pairs.
3294
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003295- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003296 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003297 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3298 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3299 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3300 previously went unchallenged.
3301
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003302New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003304
3305Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003307
3308Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003310
3311Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003313
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003314- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3315 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003316
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003317- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3318 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3319 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3320 home.
3321
3322
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003323What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003324===========================
3325
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3327
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003328Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003330
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003331- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3332 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003333
3334 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003335 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003336
3337 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3338 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003339 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003340 This needs to be documented.
3341
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003342- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3343 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3344
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003345- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3346 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3347 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3348
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003349- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3350 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3351
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003352- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3353 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3354 class forbids it).
3355
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003356- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3357 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3358 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3359
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003360- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003362Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003364
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003365- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3366 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003367 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003368
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003369- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3370 (like 1 + '').
3371
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003372Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003374
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003375- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3376 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3377 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3378 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003379 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003380 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3381
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003382- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3383 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3384 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3385 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3386
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003387- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3388 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003389 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3390 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3391 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003392
3393- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3394 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003395
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003396- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3397 bytes on its input.
3398
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003399Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003401
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003402- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003403 convenience function.
3404
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003405- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3406 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3407 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003408 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3409 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3410 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3411 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3412 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3413 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003414
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003415- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3416 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3417 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3418 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3419
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003420- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3421 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3422 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3423
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003424- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3425 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3426 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3427 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3428
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003429- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3430 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003432 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3433 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3434 new -l and -e options.
3435
3436- statcache is now deprecated.
3437
3438- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3439 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003441 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3442 time properly taken into account.
3443
3444- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3445 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3446 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3447 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3448
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003449Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003451
3452Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003454
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003455- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3456 is built with libdb3 if available.
3457
3458- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3459
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003460C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003462
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003463- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3464 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3465 PySequence_Size().
3466
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003467- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3468
3469- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3470 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3471 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3472
3473- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3474 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3475
3476- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3477 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3478
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003479New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003480-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003481
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003482- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3483 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3484
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003485- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3486 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3487
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003488- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3489
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003490Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003492
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003493- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3494 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3495
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003496Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003498
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003499Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003501
3502- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3503 removed completely in the next release.
3504
3505- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3506 OSX.
3507
3508- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3509 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3510
3511- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3512
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003513
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003514What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003515===========================
3516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3518
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003519Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003521
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003522- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003523 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003524 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003525 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3526 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003527 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3528 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003529 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3530 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003531
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003532- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3533 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3534
3535- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3536 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3537
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003538Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003540
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003541- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3542 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3543 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3544 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3545 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3546 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3547 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3548 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3549
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003550- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3551 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3552 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3553 example).
3554
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003555- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003556 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003557 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003558 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003559
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003560- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3561 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3562 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003563 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003564
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003565- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3566 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3567 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3568 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3569 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3570 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3571
3572 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3573
3574 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3575
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003576Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003577-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003578
3579- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3580
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003581- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3582
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003583- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3584 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003585
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003586- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3587 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3588 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3589 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3590 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3591 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003592 attributes.
3593
3594- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3595 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3596 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003597
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003598- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3599 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3600 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003601
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003602- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3603 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3604 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003605 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3606 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3607
3608- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3609 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003610
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003611Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003613
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003614- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3615 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3616
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003617- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3618 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3619 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3620 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3621
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003622- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3623 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3624 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3625 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3626
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003627 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3628 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3629 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3630 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3631 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3632 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3633 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3634 without losing information).
3635
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003636- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003637 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3638 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3639 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3640 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3641 module).
3642
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003643 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003644 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3645 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3646 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3647 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003648
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003649- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003650 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3651 encoding.
3652
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003653- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3654 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3655
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003657 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3658
3659- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3660 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3661 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3662 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3663
3664- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3665
3666- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3667 ON, and OFF.
3668
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003669- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3670 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3671
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003672Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003674
3675- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3676 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3677 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003678
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003679- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3680 been added: -X and -E.
3681
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003682Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003684
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003685- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3686 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3687
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003688C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003689-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003690
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003691- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3692 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3693 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3694 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3695 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3696
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003697- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3698 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3699 as long) arguments.
3700
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003701- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3702 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3703 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3704 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3705 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3706 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3707
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003708- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3709 input.
3710
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003711New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003713
3714Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003716
3717Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003719
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003720- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3721 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3722 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3723
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003724- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3725 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3726 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003727 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003728
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3730 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3731 import signal
3732 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003733
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003735 while 1:
3736 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003738 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3739 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3740 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3741 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003742
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003743
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003744What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3745===========================
3746
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3748
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003749Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003750--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003751
3752- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3753 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3754 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3755
3756- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3757 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3758 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3759 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3760 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3761 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3762 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003763
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003764- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003765 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003766 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3767 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3768 associate a docstring with a property.
3769
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003770- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3771 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3772 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3773 other built-in object types.
3774
3775- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3776 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3777 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3778 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3779 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3780
3781- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3782 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3783
3784- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3785 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003786 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003787 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3788 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3789 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3790 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3791 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3792
3793- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3794 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3795 class.
3796
3797- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3798 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3799 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3800 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3801
3802- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3803 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3804 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3805 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3806
3807- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3808 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3809
3810- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3811 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3812 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3813 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3814 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003815 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003816 with the same value as s.
3817
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003818- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3819
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003820Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003822
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003823- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3824
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003825- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3826 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3827 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3828 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3829 objects.
3830
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003831- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3832 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003833 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3834 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3835
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003836- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3837 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3838 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3839
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003840Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003842
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003843- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3844 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3845 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3846 by the instances.
3847
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003848- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3849 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3850 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3851
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003852- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3853 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3854 before the entire comparison is complete.
3855
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003856- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3857 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3858 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3859
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003860- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3861 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3862 getwriter().
3863
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003864- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3865 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3866
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003867- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003868 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3869 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3870
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003871- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3872 iterable object.
3873
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003874- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3875 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003876
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003877- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3878 authentication.
3879
3880- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3881 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003882
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003883- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003884 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3885 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3886 a sample driver.)
3887
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003888Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003890
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003891- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3892 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3893 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3894 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3895 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3896 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3897 kernel has large file support.
3898
3899- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3900 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3901 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3902 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3903 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3904
3905- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3906 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3907 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3908
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003909C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003911
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003912- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3913 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3914
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003915New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003917
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003918- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3919 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3920
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003921Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003923
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003924- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3925 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3926 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3927 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3928 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3929
3930- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3931 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3932 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3933 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3934
3935- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3936 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3937
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003938Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003940
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003941- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003942 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3943 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003944
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003945
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003946What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3947===========================
3948
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3950
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003951Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003953
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003954- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3955 big to represent as a C double.
3956
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003957- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3958 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3959 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3960 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3961 restriction).
3962
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003963- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3964 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3965 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3966 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3967 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3968
3969 >>> dir([])
3970 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3971 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3972 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3973 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3974 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3975 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3976 'reverse', 'sort']
3977
3978 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3979
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003980- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003981 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3982 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3983 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3984 OverflowError exception.
3985
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003986- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003987 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003988 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3989 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3990 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3991 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3992 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003993 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3995 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3996
3997 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3998 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3999 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4000 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004001
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004002- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004003 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4004 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4005 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4006 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4007 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4008 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4009 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4010 once it is created.
4011
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004012- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4013 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4014 (key, value) pairs.
4015
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004016- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004017 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4018 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4019
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004020- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4021 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4022 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4023 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4024 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004025
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004026- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004027 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4028 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4029
4030 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4031
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004032- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004033 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4034
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004035Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004037
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004038- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004039 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4040 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004041
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004042- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4043 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4044 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4045 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4046 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4047 in this area anymore).
4048
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004049- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4050 threading.Timer.
4051
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004052- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4053 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4054
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004055- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004056 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4057
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004058- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004059 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4060 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4061 converted to Python longs.
4062
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004063- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004064 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4065
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004066- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4067 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4068 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4069
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004070Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004072
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004073- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4074 division operators as per PEP 238.
4075
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004076Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004078
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004079- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4080 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4081 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4082 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4083
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004084C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004086
4087- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004088
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004089- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4090 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004091 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4094 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004095 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004097
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004098- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004099 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4100 module:
4101
4102 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004103
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004104 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4105 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004106
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004107 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4108 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004109
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004110 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4111
4112 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4113
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004114- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004115 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4116 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4117 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004118
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004119New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004121
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004122- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4123 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4124 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4125 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4126 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004127
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004128Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004130
4131Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004133
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004134- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4135 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4136 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4137 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004138 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4139 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4140 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4141 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4142 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004143
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004144- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004145 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4146
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004147
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004148What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4149===========================
4150
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4152
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004153Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004155
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004156- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4157 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4158
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004159- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4160 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4161 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004162
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004163- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4164 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4165 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4166 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004167
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004168- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4169
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004171
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004172Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004174
4175- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004176 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004177 the module docstring for details.
4178
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004179Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004181
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004182- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004183 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4184 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4185 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004186
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004187- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4188 Nick Mathewson.
4189
4190Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004192
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004193- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4194 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4195 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4196 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4197 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4198 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4199 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4200 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4201
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004202- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4203 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4204 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4205 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4206
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004207- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4208 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4209 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4210 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4211 come a long way).
4212
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004213- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4214 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4215 write filters for these warnings).
4216
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004217- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4218 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4219 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4220 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4221 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4222
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004223- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4224 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4225 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4226 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4227 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4228 older distribution.
4229
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004230Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004232
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004233- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4234 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004235 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004236
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004237- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4238 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4239 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4240
4241- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4242
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004243- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4244
4245- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4246
4247- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4248
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004250
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004251- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4252
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004253New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004255
4256C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004258
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004259- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4260 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4261 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4262 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4263 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4264 against buffer overruns.
4265
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004266- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004267 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4268 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004269 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4270 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4271 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4272
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004273- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4274 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4275 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4276 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4277 deprecated.
4278
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004279Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004281
4282- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4283 relevant is found.
4284
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004285
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004286What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004287===========================
4288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4290
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004291Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004293
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004294- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4295 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4296 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4297 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4298 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4299 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4300 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4301 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004302 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004303 repaired.
4304
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004305- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004306 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004307 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4308 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4309 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4310 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4311 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4312 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4313 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4314 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4315
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004316- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4317 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4318 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4319 leading BMO character).
4320
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004321- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4322 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4323 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4324
4325 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4326 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4327 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004328
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004329 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4330 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4331 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4332 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4333 for various simple to use conversions.
4334
4335 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4336 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4339 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4340 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4341 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4342 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4343 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4344 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4345 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4346 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4347 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4348 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4349 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4350 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4351 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4352 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004353
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004354- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4355 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4356 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004357 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004358 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004359
4360 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004361 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4362 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4363 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4364 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4365 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004366 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4367 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004368
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004369 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4370 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4371 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004372 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004373
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004374- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4375 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4376 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4377 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4378 floating arithmetic,
4379
4380 x = 9007199254740992.0
4381 print long(x)
4382
4383 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4384 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4385 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4386 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4387 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4388 functions are of good quality).
4389
4390 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4391 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4392 algorithms to break.
4393
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004394- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4395 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4396 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4397 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4398 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4399 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4400 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4401 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4402 order.
4403
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004404- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4405 operation along the most common code paths.
4406
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004407- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4408 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4409
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004410- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4411 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4412 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4413 {}.update(UserDict())
4414
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004415- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4416 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4417 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4418 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4419 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4420 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4421 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4422 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4423
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004424- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004425 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004427 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004428 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4429 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004430 join() method of strings
4431 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004432 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4433 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004435 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004436
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004437- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4438 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4439
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004440- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4441 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4442
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004443- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4444 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4445 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4446 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4447
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004448- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4449 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004450 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004451 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4452 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004453
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004454- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4455
4456
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004457Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004459
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004460- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004461 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004462 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4463 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4464
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004465- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4466 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4467
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004468- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4469 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4470 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4471 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4472
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004473- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4474 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4475 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4476
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004477- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4478
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004479- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4480
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004481- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4482 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4483 that are still imported into string.py).
4484
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004485- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4486
4487- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4488 Now it does.
4489
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004490- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4491
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004492- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4493 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4494 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4495 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4496 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004497 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4498 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004499
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004500- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4501 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4502 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4503 'help(object)'.
4504
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004505Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004507
4508- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004509 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004510 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4511 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4512
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004513- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004514 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4515 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004516
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004517C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004519
4520- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4521 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522
4523----
4524
4525**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**