blob: d52ceaccbacbfe8b4abc64267cd1f72dc7c49f3b [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
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000015- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
16 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000017
18Extension modules
19-----------------
20
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000021- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
22 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
23 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000024
25Library
26-------
27
28TBD
29
30Tools/Demos
31-----------
32
33TBD
34
35Build
36-----
37
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +000038- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
39 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000040
41C API
42-----
43
44TBD
45
46New platforms
47-------------
48
49TBD
50
51Tests
52-----
53
54TBD
55
56Windows
57-------
58
59TBD
60
61Mac
62---
63
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +000064- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
65 the window manager, false otherwise.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000066
67
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000068What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
69=================================
70
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +000071*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000072
73Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000074-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000075
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +000076- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
77 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
78 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
79
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +000080- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
81 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
82 (SF patch #664376.)
83
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000084- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
85 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
86 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
87 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
88 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
89 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +000090 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000091
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +000092- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
93 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
94 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
95 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +000096 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +000097
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +000098- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
99 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
100 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
101 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
102 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
103 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
104 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
105 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
106 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
107 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
108 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
109
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000110- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
111 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
112 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
113 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
114 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
115 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
116
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000117- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
118 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
119
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000120- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
121 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
122 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
123 case.)
124
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000125- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
126 passed as unicode strings.
127
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000128- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
129 See SF bug #683467.
130
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000131- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
132 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
133
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000134- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
135
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000136- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
137
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000138- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
139 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
140 arguments.
141
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000142- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
143 See SF bug #667147.
144
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000145- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000146 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000147 See SF bug #676155.
148
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000149- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000150 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000151 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
152 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
153 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
154 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
155 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
156 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000157
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000158Extension modules
159-----------------
160
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000161- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
162 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
163 tp_as_number pointer.
164
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000165- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
166 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
167 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
168 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
169 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
170
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000171- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
172
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000173- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
174
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000175- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000176 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000177 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
178 patch #678531.)
179
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000180- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
181 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
182
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000183- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
184 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
185
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000186- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
187 library.
188
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000189- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
190
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000191- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
192 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
193 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
194
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000195- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
196
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000197- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
198 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
199
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000200- Fixed serveral serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
201
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000202- datetime changes:
203
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000204 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
205 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
206 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
207 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
208 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
209 now.
210
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000211 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000212 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
213 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000214
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000215 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000216 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000217 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
218 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
219 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
220 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000221
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000222 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
223 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
224 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000225 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
226
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000227 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
228 by a later example coded by Guido.
229
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000230 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000231 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
232 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
233 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000234 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
235 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
236
237 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
238 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
239 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
240 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
241 tzinfo subclass instance.
242
243 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
244 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
245 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
246 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
247 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
248 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
249 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
250 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000251
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000252 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
253 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
254 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
255 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
256 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000257 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
258
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000259 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000260
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000261 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
262 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
263 as a naive datetime object.
264
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000265 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
266 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
267 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
268
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000269 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
270 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
271 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
272 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
273 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
274 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
275 comparison.
276
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000277 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
278 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
279 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
280 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000281 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000282
283 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000284
285 and ::
286
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000287 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
288
289 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
290 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
291 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
292 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
293
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000294 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
295 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
296 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
297 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
298 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
299
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000300 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
301 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000302 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
303 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000304
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000305Library
306-------
307
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000308- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
309 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
310
311- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
312 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
313 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
314 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
315 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
316 See PEP 307 for details.
317
318- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
319 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
320
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000321- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
322 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000323 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
324 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
325 available from the os module.
326 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000327
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000328- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
329 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
330
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000331- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
332 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
333 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
334
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000335- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
336
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000337- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
338 exception.
339
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000340- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
341 class.
342
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000343- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
344 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
345 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
346
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000347- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
348 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
349
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000350- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000351 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
352 See SF bug #659228.
353
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000354- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
355 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
356 See SF patch #651082.
357
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000358- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000359
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000360- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
361 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
362
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000363- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000364 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000365
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000366Tools/Demos
367-----------
368
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000369- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
370 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
371 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
372 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
373 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
374 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
375 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
376 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
377 example:
378
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000379 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
380 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000381
382 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
383
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000384
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000385Build
386-----
387
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000388- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
389 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
390 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000391 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
392
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000393 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
394
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000395- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
396 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
397 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
398 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
399 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
400 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
401 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
402 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
403 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
404
405- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
406 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
407 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
408 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
409
410- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
411 from the Tools/scripts directory.
412
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000413C API
414-----
415
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000416- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
417 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000418
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000419- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
420 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
421 tp_as_number pointer.
422
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000423- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
424 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
425 (SF #681367)
426
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000427- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
428 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
429 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
430 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000431
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000432Tests
433-----
434
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000435- Several tests weren't being run rom regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
436 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
437 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
438 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
439 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
440 pydoc.)
441
442- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
443
444- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000445
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000446Windows
447-------
448
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000449- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
450 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
451 time).
452
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000453- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
454 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
455
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000456- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
457 release without strong cryptography.
458
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000459- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000460 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000461
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000462- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
463 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
464
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000465Mac
466---
467
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000468- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
469 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000470
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000471- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
472 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
473 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000474
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000475- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
476 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000477
478- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
479 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
480 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
481 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
482
483- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000484 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
485 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
486 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000487
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000488
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000489What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000490=================================
491
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000492*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000493
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000494Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000495--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000496
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000497- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
498
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000499- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
500 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000501 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000502 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000503 a different meaning than before.
504
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000505- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000506 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000507 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000508
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000509- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000510 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000511 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000512
513- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
514 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
515 and deallocation.
516
517- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
518 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
519
520- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
521 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
522 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
523 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
524 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
525
526- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
527 now detected by the garbage collector.
528
529- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
530 [SF bug 519621]
531
532- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
533 identifier.
534
535- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
536 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
537 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
538 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
539 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
540 [SF bug 563060]
541
542- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
543 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
544 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
545 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
546 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
547
548- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
549 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
550 not called. [SF bug #537450]
551
552- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
553
554- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
555 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
556 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
557 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
558 state of the slots would be lost.)
559
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000560Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000561-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000562
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000563- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000564 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
565 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
566 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
567 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000568 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
569 Jython 2.1.
570
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000571- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000572 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000573 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
574 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
575 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
576 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
577 these, see PEP 302.
578
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000579- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
580 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
581 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
582
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000583- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
584 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
585 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
586
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000587- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
588 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
589 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
590
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000591- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
592 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
593 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
594 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
595 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
596 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
597 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
598 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
599 releases or implementations.
600
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000601- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000602 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
603 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000604
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000605- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
606 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
607
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000608- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
609 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
610 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
611
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000612- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
613 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
614
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000615- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
616 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000617 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
618 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000619
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000620- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
621 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
622 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
623 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
624 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
625
626 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
627 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
628 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
629 pattern.
630
631 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
632 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
633 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
634 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
635
636 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
637 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
638 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
639 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
640 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
641 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
642
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000643- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
644 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
645 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
646 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
647 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
648 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
649 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
650 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000651
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000652- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
653 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
654 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
655 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
656 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000657 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
658 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
659 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
660 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
661 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
662 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
663 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000664
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000665- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
666 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
667
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000668- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
669 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
670 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
671 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
672 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
673 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
674 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
675 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
676 to Zack Weinberg!
677
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000678- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
679 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
680 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
681 type. This has been fixed now.
682
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000683- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
684 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
685 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
686
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000687- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
688 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
689 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
690 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
691 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
692 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
693 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
694 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000695 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000696
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000697- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
698 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
699 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000700
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000701- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
702 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
703 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
704 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
705 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
706 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
707 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
708 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000709 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000710 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
711 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
712
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000713- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
714 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
715 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
716 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
717 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
718 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
719 this.)
720
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000721- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
722 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000723 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000724 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000725 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
726 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000727 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
728 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000729
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000730- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
731 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
732 currently running.
733
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000734- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
735 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
736 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
737 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
738
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000739- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
740 as directory names.
741
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000742- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
743 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
744
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000745- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
746 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
747
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000748- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000749 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
750 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000751
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000752- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
753 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
754 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
755 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
756 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
757
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000758- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
759 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
760 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
761 removed.
762
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000763- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
764 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
765 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
766
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000767- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
768 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
769 to __debug__.
770
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000771- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
772 string to the left with zeros. For example,
773 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
774
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000775- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
776 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
777 deprecated now.
778
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000779- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
780 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
781 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000782
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000783- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
784 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
785 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
786 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
787 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000788
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000789- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
790 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
791
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000792- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
793 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
794 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000795 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000796 is backward compatible.
797
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000798- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
799 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
800 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
801 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
802 could access a pointer to freed memory.
803
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000804- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
805 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
806 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
807 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
808 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
809 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000810
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000811- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
812 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
813
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000814- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
815 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
816
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000817- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
818 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
819 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
820 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
821 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
822
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000823- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
824 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
825 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
826
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000827- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000828 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
829
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000830- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
831 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
832 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000833
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000834- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
835 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
836
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000837- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
838 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
839 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
840
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000841- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
842
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000843Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000844-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000845
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000846- Added three operators to the operator module:
847 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
848 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
849 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
850
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000851- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
852
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000853- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
854 archives.
855
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000856- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
857 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
858 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
859
860 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
861
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000862- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
863 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
864 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000865 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000866
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000867- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
868 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
869 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
870 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000871 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
872 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
873 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
874 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000875
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000876- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
877 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000878
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000879- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
880
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000881- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
882 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
883
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000884- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
885 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
886 supported.
887
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000888- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
889
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000890- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
891 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000892
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000893- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
894 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
895
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000896- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
897
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000898- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
899 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
900
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000901- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
902 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
903 functions but callable type objects.
904
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000905- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000906 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000907 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000908
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000909- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
910 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000911
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000912- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
913 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000914
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000915- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
916 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
917 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
918 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
919
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000920- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
921 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000922
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000923- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
924 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
925 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
926 and __imul__.
927
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000928- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000929 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
930 is called.
931
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000932- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
933 been added where available.
934
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000935- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
936 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
937 interpreter was compiled.
938
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000939- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
940 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
941 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000942 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000943 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
944 1, not 2.
945
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000946- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
947 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
948 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
949 limit.
950
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000951- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
952 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
953 bug #623464.
954
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000955- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
956 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
957 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
958 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
959
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000960Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000961-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000962
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000963- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
964
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000965- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
966 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
967 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
968 with Python 2.3a2.
969
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000970- os.path exposes getctime.
971
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000972- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
973 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
974 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
975 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
976 unit tests of floating point results.
977
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000978- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
979 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
980 has been increased.
981
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000982- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
983 executed.
984
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000985- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
986 postinstallation script.
987
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000988- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
989 test the current module.
990
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000991- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
992 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
993 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
994 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
995 this behavior needs to be controlled.
996
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000997- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000998 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000999 Ward's Optik package.
1000
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001001- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1002 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1003 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1004 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1005
1006- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1007 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001008 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001009
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001010- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1011 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1012 shelf are binary pickles.
1013
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001014- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1015 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1016
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001017- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1018 modules are iterators now.
1019
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001020- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1021 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1022 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1023 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1024 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1025 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001026
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001027- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1028 with their entity value.
1029
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001030- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1031
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001032- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1033 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001034
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001035- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1036 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001037 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001038
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001039- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1040 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1041 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1042 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1043 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1044 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1045 main():
1046
1047 import locale
1048 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1049
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001050- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1051 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1052
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001053- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1054 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1055 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1056 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1057 to the new standard.
1058
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001059- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1060 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1061 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1062 an extension to the database.
1063
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001064- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1065 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1066 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1067 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001068 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001069
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001070- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001071 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001072
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001073- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1074 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1075 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1076 bounded integers.
1077
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001078- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1079 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1080 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1081 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1082 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1083 in existence.
1084
1085 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1086 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1087 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1088 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1089 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1090 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1091
1092 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1093 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1094 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1095 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1096
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001097- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1098 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1099 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1100
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001101- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1102
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001103- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1104 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1105 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1106 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1107
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001108- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1109 argument.
1110
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001111- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1112 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1113 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1114 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1115 [SF patch 560794].
1116
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001117- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1118 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1119 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001120 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1121 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1122 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001123
1124- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1125 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001126
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001127- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1128 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1129 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1130 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001131
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001132- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1133 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1134 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1135 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1136 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1137
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001138- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001139
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001140- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1141
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001142- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1143 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1144 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1145 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1146 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1147 identical to None.
1148
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001149- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1150 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1151 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1152 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1153 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1154 results now.
1155
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001156- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1157 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1158
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001159- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1160 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1161 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1162 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1163 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1164 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1165 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1166 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1167
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001168- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1169
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001170- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1171 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1172
1173- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1174 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1175 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1176 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1177 and other systems.
1178
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001179- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1180 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1181 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1182 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 +00001183 work well with these.
1184
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001185- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1186
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001187- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001188 connections.
1189
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001190- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1191 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1192 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1193
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001194- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1195 sets
1196
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001197- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1198 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1199 name.
1200
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001201- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1202 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1203 passed in.
1204
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001205- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001206 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001207 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1208 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001209
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001210- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1211
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001212- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1213
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001214- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1215 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1216 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1217
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001218- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1219 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1220 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1221 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001222 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001223
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001224- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001225 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001226 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001227
1228- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1229 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1230 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1231
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001232- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001233 the value of its expression argument.
1234
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001235- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1236 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1237 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1238
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001239- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1240 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1241 skipstone browser was included.
1242
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001243- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1244 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1245
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001246Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001247-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001248
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001249- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1250 names in addition to accepting file names.
1251
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001252- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1253 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1254 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1255 still used and useful.)
1256
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001257- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1258 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1259 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1260 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001261
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001262- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1263 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1264 the generated binary.
1265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001266Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001267-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001268
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001269- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1270
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001271- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1272 except in the hands of experts.
1273
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001274- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001275 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1276 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1277 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001278
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001279- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1280 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1281 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1282 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1283 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1284 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1285 builds.
1286
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001287- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1288 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1289 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1290 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1291 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1292 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1293 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1294 new type.
1295
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001296- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001297
1298 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1299 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1300 positive infinities.
1301
1302 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1303 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1304 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1305 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1306 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1307 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1308 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1309
1310 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1311
1312 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1313
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001314- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1315 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1316 size of the executable.
1317
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001318- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1319 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1320 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1321 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001322
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001323- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1324
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001325- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1326 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1327 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001328
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001329- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1330 well as Unix.
1331
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001332- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1333 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1334 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1335 modules in the README file for details.
1336
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001337C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001338-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001339
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001340- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1341 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001342 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001343 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001344 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001345
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001346- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1347 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1348 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1349 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1350 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1351 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1352 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1353 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1354 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1355 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1356 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1357 aligned.)
1358
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001359- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1360 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1361 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1362
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001363- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1364 level.
1365
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001366- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1367 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1368 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1369 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1370 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1371
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001372- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1373 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1374 code.
1375
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001376- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1377 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1378 adjusting for negative indices.
1379
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001380- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1381 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1382 object.
1383
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001384- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1385 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1386 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1387
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001388- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1389 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001390
1391- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1392
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001393- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1394 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1395 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1396 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1397
1398- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1399
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001400- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001401
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001402- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001403 without going through the buffer API.
1404
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001405- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001406
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001407- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1408 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1409 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1410 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001412- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1413 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1414
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001415- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001416 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1417
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001418New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001419-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001420
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001421- OpenVMS is now supported.
1422
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001423- AtheOS is now supported.
1424
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001425- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1426
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001427- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1428
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001429Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001430-----
1431
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001432- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1433 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1434 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001435
1436Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001437-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001438
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001439- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1440 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1441 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1442 bugs.
1443 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001444 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1445 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1446 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001447 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001448
1449- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001450 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001451
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001452- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1453 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1454
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001455- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1456 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1457 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1458 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1459
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001460- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1461 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1462 use files" uninstall option).
1463
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001464- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1465
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001466- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1467 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1468
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001469- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1470 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1471 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1472
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001473- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1474 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1475 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1476 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1477 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001478 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1479 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1480 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001481
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001482- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001483 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001484 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1485 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1486 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1487 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1488 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1489 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1490 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1491 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1492 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1493 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1494 work around.
1495
1496- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1497 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1498 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1499 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1500 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1501 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1502 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1503 specified with O_CREAT too).
1504
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001505Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001506----
1507
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001508- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001509
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001510- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1511 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1512 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1513
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001514- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1515 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1516 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1517
1518- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1519 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1520 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1521 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1522 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1523 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1524 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1525 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001526
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001527- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1528 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1529 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001530
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001531- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1532 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1533 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1534 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1535 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001536
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001537- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1538 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1539 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001540
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001541- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1542 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001543
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001544- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1545 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1546 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1547 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1548 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001549
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001550- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1551 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1552 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1553
1554- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1555 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1556 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001557
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001558- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1559 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1560 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1561 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1562 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001564- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1565 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001567- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1568 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001569
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001570- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001571 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001572 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1573 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001574
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001575
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001576What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001577===============================
1578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001579*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1580
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001581Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001582--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001583
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001584- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1585 with a custom metaclass.
1586
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001587Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001588-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001589
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001590- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1591 are proxies.
1592
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001593Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001594-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001595
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001596- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1597 very short strings.
1598
1599- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1600 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1601 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1602 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1603 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1604
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001605Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001606-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001607
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001608- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1609 close or delete time).
1610
1611- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1612 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1613
1614- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1615
1616- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001617 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001618
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001619Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001620-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001621
1622Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001623-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001624
1625C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001626-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001627
1628New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001629-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001630
1631Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001632-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001633
1634Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001635-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001636
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001637- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1638
1639- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1640 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1641
1642- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1643 deleted at process exit time.
1644
1645- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1646 in backslash.
1647
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001648Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001649----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001650
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001651- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1652 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1653 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001655
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001656What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001657===========================
1658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001659*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001661Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001662--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001663
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001664- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1665 been extensively updated. See
1666
1667 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1668
1669 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1670
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001671- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1672 deleted!
1673
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001674- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1675 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1676 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1677 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1678 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1679
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001680- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1681
1682 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1683 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1684
1685 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1686 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1687 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1688 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1689 supported anyway.
1690
1691 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1692 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1693
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001694- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1695 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1696 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1697 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1698 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001699
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001700- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1701 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1702 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1703
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001704Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001705-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001706
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001707- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1708 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1709 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1710 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1711 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1712 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001713 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1714 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1715 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1716 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001717
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001718- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1719 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1720 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001722Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001723-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001724
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001725- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1726
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001727Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001729
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001730- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1731 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1732 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1733 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1734 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1735 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1736
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001737- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1738
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001739- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1740
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001741- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1742
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001743- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1744 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1745 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1746
1747- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1748
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001749Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001750-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001751
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001752- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1753 off a search on Google.
1754
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001755Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001756-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001757
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001758- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1759 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1760 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1761 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1762 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1763 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1764 other platforms should do likewise.
1765
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001766- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1767 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1768 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1769
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001770C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001771-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001772
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001773- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1774 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1775 producing key-value pairs.
1776
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001777- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001778 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001779 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1780 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1781 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1782 previously went unchallenged.
1783
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001785-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001786
1787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001788-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001789
1790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001791-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001792
1793Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001794----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001795
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001796- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1797 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001798
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001799- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1800 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1801 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1802 home.
1803
1804
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001805What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001806===========================
1807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001808*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1809
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001810Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001811--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001812
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001813- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1814 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001815
1816 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001817 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001818
1819 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1820 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001821 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001822 This needs to be documented.
1823
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001824- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1825 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1826
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001827- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1828 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1829 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1830
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001831- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1832 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1833
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001834- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1835 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1836 class forbids it).
1837
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001838- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1839 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1840 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1841
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001842- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1843
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001844Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001845-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001846
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001847- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1848 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001849 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001850
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001851- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1852 (like 1 + '').
1853
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001854Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001855-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001856
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001857- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1858 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1859 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1860 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001861 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001862 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1863
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001864- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1865 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1866 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1867 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1868
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001869- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1870 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001871 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1872 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1873 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001874
1875- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1876 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001877
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001878- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1879 bytes on its input.
1880
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001881Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001882-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001883
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001884- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001885 convenience function.
1886
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001887- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1888 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1889 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001890 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1891 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1892 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1893 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1894 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1895 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001896
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001897- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1898 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1899 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1900 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1901
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001902- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1903 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1904 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1905
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001906- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1907 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1908 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1909 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1910
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001911- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1912 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001913 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001914 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1915 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1916 new -l and -e options.
1917
1918- statcache is now deprecated.
1919
1920- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1921 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001922 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001923 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1924 time properly taken into account.
1925
1926- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1927 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1928 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1929 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1930
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001931Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001932-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001933
1934Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001935-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001936
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001937- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1938 is built with libdb3 if available.
1939
1940- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1941
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001942C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001944
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001945- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1946 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1947 PySequence_Size().
1948
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001949- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1950
1951- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1952 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1953 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1954
1955- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1956 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1957
1958- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1959 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1960
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001961New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001962-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001963
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001964- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1965 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1966
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001967- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1968 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1969
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001970- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1971
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001972Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001973-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001974
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001975- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1976 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1977
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001978Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001979-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001980
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001981Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001982----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001983
1984- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1985 removed completely in the next release.
1986
1987- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1988 OSX.
1989
1990- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1991 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1992
1993- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001995
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001996What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001997===========================
1998
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2000
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002001Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002003
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002004- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002005 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002006 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002007 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2008 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002009 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2010 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002011 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2012 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002013
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002014- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2015 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2016
2017- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2018 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2019
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002020Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002021-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002022
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002023- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2024 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2025 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2026 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2027 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2028 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2029 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2030 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2031
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002032- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2033 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2034 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2035 example).
2036
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002037- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002038 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002039 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002040 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002041
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002042- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2043 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2044 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002045 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002046
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002047- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2048 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2049 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2050 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2051 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2052 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2053
2054 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2055
2056 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2057
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002058Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002060
2061- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2062
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002063- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2064
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002065- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2066 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002067
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002068- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2069 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2070 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2071 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2072 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2073 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002074 attributes.
2075
2076- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2077 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2078 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002079
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002080- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2081 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2082 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002083
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002084- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2085 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2086 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002087 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2088 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2089
2090- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2091 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002092
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002095
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002096- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2097 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2098
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002099- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2100 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2101 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2102 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2103
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002104- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2105 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2106 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2107 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2108
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002109 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2110 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2111 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2112 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2113 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2114 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2115 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2116 without losing information).
2117
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002118- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002119 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2120 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2121 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2122 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2123 module).
2124
2125 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
2126 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2127 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2128 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2129 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002130
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002131- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002132 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2133 encoding.
2134
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002135- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2136 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002138- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002139 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2140
2141- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2142 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2143 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2144 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2145
2146- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2147
2148- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2149 ON, and OFF.
2150
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002151- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2152 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2153
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002154Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002155-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002156
2157- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2158 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2159 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002160
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002161- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2162 been added: -X and -E.
2163
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002164Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002165-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002166
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002167- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2168 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2169
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002170C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002171-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002172
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002173- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2174 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2175 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2176 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2177 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2178
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002179- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2180 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2181 as long) arguments.
2182
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002183- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2184 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2185 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2186 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2187 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2188 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2189
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002190- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2191 input.
2192
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002193New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002194-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002195
2196Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002197-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002198
2199Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002200-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002201
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002202- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2203 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2204 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2205
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002206- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2207 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2208 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002209 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002211 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2212 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2213 import signal
2214 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002216 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002217 while 1:
2218 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002219 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002220 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2221 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2222 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2223 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002224
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002225
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002226What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2227===========================
2228
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002229*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2230
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002231Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002232--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002233
2234- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2235 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2236 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2237
2238- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2239 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2240 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2241 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2242 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2243 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2244 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002245
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002246- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002247 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002248 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2249 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2250 associate a docstring with a property.
2251
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002252- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2253 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2254 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2255 other built-in object types.
2256
2257- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2258 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2259 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2260 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2261 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2262
2263- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2264 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2265
2266- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2267 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002268 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002269 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2270 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2271 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2272 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2273 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2274
2275- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2276 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2277 class.
2278
2279- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2280 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2281 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2282 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2283
2284- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2285 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2286 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2287 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2288
2289- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2290 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2291
2292- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2293 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2294 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2295 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2296 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002297 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002298 with the same value as s.
2299
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002300- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2301
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002302Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002304
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002305- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2306
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002307- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2308 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2309 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2310 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2311 objects.
2312
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002313- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2314 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002315 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2316 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2317
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002318- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2319 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2320 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2321
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002322Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002323-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002324
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002325- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2326 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2327 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2328 by the instances.
2329
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002330- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2331 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2332 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2333
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002334- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2335 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2336 before the entire comparison is complete.
2337
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002338- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2339 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2340 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2341
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002342- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2343 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2344 getwriter().
2345
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002346- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2347 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2348
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002349- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002350 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2351 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2352
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002353- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2354 iterable object.
2355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002356- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2357 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002358
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002359- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2360 authentication.
2361
2362- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2363 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002364
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002365- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002366 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2367 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2368 a sample driver.)
2369
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002370Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002371-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002372
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002373- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2374 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2375 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2376 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2377 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2378 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2379 kernel has large file support.
2380
2381- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2382 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2383 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2384 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2385 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2386
2387- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2388 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2389 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2390
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002391C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002392-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002393
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002394- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2395 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2396
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002397New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002399
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002400- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2401 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2402
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002403Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002404-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002405
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002406- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2407 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2408 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2409 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2410 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2411
2412- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2413 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2414 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2415 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2416
2417- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2418 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002420Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002421-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002423- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002424 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2425 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002426
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002427
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002428What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2429===========================
2430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002431*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2432
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002433Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002434----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002435
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002436- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2437 big to represent as a C double.
2438
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002439- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2440 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2441 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2442 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2443 restriction).
2444
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002445- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2446 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2447 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2448 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2449 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2450
2451 >>> dir([])
2452 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2453 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2454 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2455 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2456 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2457 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2458 'reverse', 'sort']
2459
2460 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2461
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002462- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002463 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2464 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2465 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2466 OverflowError exception.
2467
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002468- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002469 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002470 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2471 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2472 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2473 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2474 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002475 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002476 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2477 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2478
2479 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2480 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2481 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2482 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002484- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002485 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2486 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2487 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2488 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2489 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2490 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2491 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2492 once it is created.
2493
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002494- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2495 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2496 (key, value) pairs.
2497
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002498- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002499 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2500 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2501
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002502- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2503 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2504 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2505 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2506 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002508- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002509 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2510 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2511
2512 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2513
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002514- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002515 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2516
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002517Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002518-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002519
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002520- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002521 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2522 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002523
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002524- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2525 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2526 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2527 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2528 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2529 in this area anymore).
2530
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002531- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2532 threading.Timer.
2533
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002534- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2535 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2536
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002537- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002538 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2539
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002540- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002541 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2542 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2543 converted to Python longs.
2544
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002545- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002546 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2547
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002548- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2549 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2550 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2551
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002552Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002553-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002554
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002555- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2556 division operators as per PEP 238.
2557
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002558Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002559-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002560
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002561- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2562 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2563 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2564 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2565
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002566C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002568
2569- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002570
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002571- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2572 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002573 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002574
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002575 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2576 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002577 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002578 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002579
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002580- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002581 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2582 module:
2583
2584 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002585
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002586 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2587 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002588
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002589 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2590 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002591
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002592 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2593
2594 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2595
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002596- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002597 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2598 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2599 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002600
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002601New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002602-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002603
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002604- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2605 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2606 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2607 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2608 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002609
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002610Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002612
2613Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002615
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002616- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2617 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2618 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2619 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002620 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2621 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2622 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2623 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2624 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002625
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002626- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002627 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2628
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002629
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002630What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2631===========================
2632
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002633*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2634
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002635Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002636-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002637
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002638- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2639 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2640
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002641- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2642 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2643 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002644
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002645- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2646 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2647 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2648 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002649
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002650- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2651
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002653
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002654Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002655-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002656
2657- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002658 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002659 the module docstring for details.
2660
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002661Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002662-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002663
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002664- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002665 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2666 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2667 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002668
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002669- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2670 Nick Mathewson.
2671
2672Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002673----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002674
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002675- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2676 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2677 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2678 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2679 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2680 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2681 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2682 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2683
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002684- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2685 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2686 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2687 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2688
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002689- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2690 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2691 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2692 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2693 come a long way).
2694
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002695- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2696 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2697 write filters for these warnings).
2698
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002699- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2700 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2701 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2702 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2703 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2704
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002705- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2706 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2707 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2708 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2709 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2710 older distribution.
2711
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002712Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002714
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002715- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2716 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002717 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002718
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002719- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2720 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2721 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2722
2723- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2724
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002725- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2726
2727- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2728
2729- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2730
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002731- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002732
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002733- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2734
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002735New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002737
2738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002739-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002740
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002741- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2742 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2743 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2744 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2745 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2746 against buffer overruns.
2747
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002748- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002749 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2750 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002751 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2752 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2753 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2754
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002755- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2756 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2757 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2758 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2759 deprecated.
2760
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002762-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002763
2764- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2765 relevant is found.
2766
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002767
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002768What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002769===========================
2770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002771*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2772
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002773Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002775
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002776- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2777 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2778 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2779 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2780 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2781 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2782 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2783 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002784 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002785 repaired.
2786
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002787- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002788 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002789 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2790 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2791 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2792 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2793 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2794 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2795 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2796 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2797
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002798- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2799 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2800 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2801 leading BMO character).
2802
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002803- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2804 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2805 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2806
2807 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2808 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2809 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002810
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002811 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2812 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2813 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2814 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2815 for various simple to use conversions.
2816
2817 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2818 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2819
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002820 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2821 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2822 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2823 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2824 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2825 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2826 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2827 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2828 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2829 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2830 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2831 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2832 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2833 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2834 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002835
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002836- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2837 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2838 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002839 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002840 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002841
2842 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002843 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2844 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2845 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2846 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2847 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002848 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2849 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002850
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002851 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2852 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2853 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002854 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002855
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002856- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2857 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2858 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2859 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2860 floating arithmetic,
2861
2862 x = 9007199254740992.0
2863 print long(x)
2864
2865 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2866 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2867 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2868 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2869 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2870 functions are of good quality).
2871
2872 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2873 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2874 algorithms to break.
2875
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002876- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2877 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2878 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2879 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2880 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2881 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2882 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2883 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2884 order.
2885
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002886- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2887 operation along the most common code paths.
2888
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002889- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2890 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2891
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002892- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2893 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2894 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2895 {}.update(UserDict())
2896
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002897- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2898 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2899 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2900 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2901 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2902 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2903 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2904 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2905
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002906- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002907 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002908
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002909 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002910 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2911 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002912 join() method of strings
2913 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002914 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2915 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002916 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002917 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002918
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002919- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2920 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2921
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002922- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2923 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2924
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002925- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2926 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2927 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2928 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2929
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002930- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2931 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002932 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002933 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2934 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002935
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002936- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2937
2938
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002939Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002941
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002942- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002943 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002944 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2945 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2946
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002947- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2948 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2949
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002950- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2951 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2952 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2953 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2954
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002955- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2956 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2957 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2958
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002959- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2960
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002961- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2962
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002963- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2964 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2965 that are still imported into string.py).
2966
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002967- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2968
2969- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2970 Now it does.
2971
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002972- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2973
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002974- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2975 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2976 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2977 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2978 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002979 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2980 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002981
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002982- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2983 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2984 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2985 'help(object)'.
2986
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002987Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002989
2990- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002991 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002992 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2993 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2994
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002995- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002996 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2997 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002998
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002999C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003001
3002- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3003 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003004
3005----
3006
3007**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**