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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +000015- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
16 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
17
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +000018- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
19 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
20 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
21 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
22
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000023- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
24 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
25
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000026- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
27 constant.
28
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000029- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
30 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
31 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
32 large), and to anomalies such as
33 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
34 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
35 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
36 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000037
38Extension modules
39-----------------
40
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000041- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
42 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000043 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
44 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
45 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000046
47Library
48-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000049
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +000050- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +000051
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +000052- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
53 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
54 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
55 Closes bug #1039270.
56
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000057- Updates for the email package:
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +000058 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000059 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
60 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
61 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
62 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
63 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
64 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
65 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
66 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
67 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
68 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
69 + Updates to documentation.
70
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000071- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
72 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
73 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
74 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
75
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000076- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000077
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000078- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
79 applications should use the getmember function.
80
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000081- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
82
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000083- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
84 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
85 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
86 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
87 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
88 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
89 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
90 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
91 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
92
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000093- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
94 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000095 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000096
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000097- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
98 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
99 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
100 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
101 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
102 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
103 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
104 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000105
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000106- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
107 the new public features (of which there are many).
108
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000109- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000110 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
111 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
112 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
113 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000114 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000115
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000116- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
117
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000118- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
119 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
120 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
121 options.
122
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000123- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
124 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
125 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
126 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
127 conditions under which non-string values work.
128
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000129Build
130-----
131
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000132- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
133 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
134 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
135
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000136- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
137 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
138 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
139 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
140 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000141
142C API
143-----
144
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000145- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
146 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
147
148- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
149
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000150- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
151 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
152 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
153 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
154 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
155 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
156 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
157 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
158 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
159
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000160- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
161
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000162- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
163 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
164 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000165
166Documentation
167-------------
168
169...
170
171Tests
172-----
173
174- test__locale ported to unittest
175
176Windows
177-------
178
179...
180
181Mac
182---
183
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000184- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
185 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
186 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000187
188New platforms
189-------------
190
191...
192
193Tools/Demos
194-----------
195
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000196- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
197 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
198 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
199 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
200 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000201
202
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000203What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
204=================================
205
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000206*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000207
208Core and builtins
209-----------------
210
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000211- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000212 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
213
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000214- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
215 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
216 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
217 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
218 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
219 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
220 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
221 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000222 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
223 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
224 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
225 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
226 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000227
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000228- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
229 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
230 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
231 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
232 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
233
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000234- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
235
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000236- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
237 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
238
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000239- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
240 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
241 modified the list.
242
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000243- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
244 functions is now writable.
245
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000246- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
247 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
248 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
249 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
250
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000251- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
252 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
253 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
254 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
255 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000256
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000257- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
258 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
259
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000260Extension modules
261-----------------
262
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000263- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
264
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000265- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
266 data.
267
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000268- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
269 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
270 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
271 supposed to have been truncated away.
272
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000273- Added socket.socketpair().
274
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000275- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
276 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
277
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000278- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000279 versions of Python, have now been removed.
280
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000281Library
282-------
283
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000284- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000285 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000286
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000287- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
288 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
289
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000290- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
291 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
292
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000293- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
294
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000295- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
296 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000297
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000298- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
299 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
300
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000301- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
302
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000303- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
304
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000305- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
306
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000307- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
308 Percivall.
309
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000310- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
311 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
312
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000313- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
314 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
315 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000316 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000317
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000318- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
319 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
320 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
321 and exponent.
322
323- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
324
325- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
326 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
327 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
328
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000329- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
330 to the readline module.
331
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000332- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000333 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
334 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000335
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000336- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
337 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
338 contains symlinks.
339
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000340- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
341 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
342
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000343- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
344 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
345 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
346
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000347- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
348 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
349 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
350 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
351 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
352 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
353 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
354 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
355 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
356 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
357 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
358 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
359 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
360
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000361- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
362
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000363Tools/Demos
364-----------
365
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000366- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
367 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
368
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000369- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
370
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000371Build
372-----
373
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000374- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
375 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
376 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
377 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
378 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
379 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
380 plans to do so.
381
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000382- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
383 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
384
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000385- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
386 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
387
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000388- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
389 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
390
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000391- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
392 GNU/k*BSD systems.
393
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000394- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
395 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
396
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000397C API
398-----
399
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000400..
401
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000402Documentation
403-------------
404
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000405- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
406 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
407
408- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
409 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
410 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000411
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000412New platforms
413-------------
414
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000415- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
416
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000417Tests
418-----
419
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000420..
421
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000422Windows
423-------
424
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000425- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
426 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
427 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
428 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
429 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
430 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
431 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
432 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
433 the problem.
434
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000435Mac
436---
437
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000438..
439
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000440
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000441What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
442=================================
443
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000444*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000445
446Core and builtins
447-----------------
448
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000449- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
450 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
451 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
452 sensitive code.
453
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000454- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000455 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000456
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000457 @staticmethod
458 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000459
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000460 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000461
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000462- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
463 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
464 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
465 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
466 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
467 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
468 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
469 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
470 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
471 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
472 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
473
474 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
475 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
476 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
477 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
478 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
479 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
480 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
481
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000482- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
483 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
484
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000485- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000486 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000487
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000488- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000489 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000490 which was missing for no apparent reason.
491
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000492- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000493 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
494 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
495
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000496- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
497 types that support garbage collection.
498
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000499- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
500
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000501- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
502 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
503 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
504 Jython.
505
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000506- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
507
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000508- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
509 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
510
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000511- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
512 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
513 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000514
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000515- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
516 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
517 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
518
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000519Extension modules
520-----------------
521
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000522- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
523
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000524Library
525-------
526
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000527- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
528 TIS-620
529
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000530- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
531 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
532 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
533 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
534 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
535 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
536 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
537 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
538 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
539 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
540
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000541- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
542
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000543- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
544 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
545 same as when the argument is omitted).
546 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
547
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000548- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
549
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000550- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
551 schemes are offered.
552
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000553- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
554
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000555- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
556 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
557 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
558
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000559- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
560
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000561- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
562 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
563
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000564- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
565 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
566 when dummy_threading is being used.
567
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000568- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
569 from a tarfile.
570
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000571- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000572 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000573
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000574- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
575 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
576 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
577 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
578
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000579- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
580 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
581
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000582- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
583 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
584 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
585 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
586 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
587 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
588 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
589 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
590 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
591 by some other method in progress).
592
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000593- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
594 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
595 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000596
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000597- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
598
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000599- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
600 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
601 AM Kuchling.
602
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000603- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
604 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
605 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
606
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000607- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
608 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
609 instead of unsigned.
610
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000611- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000612 no longer part of the public API.
613
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000614- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
615 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
616 string methods of the same name).
617
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000618- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000619 SF patch 945642.
620
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000621- doctest unittest integration improvements:
622
623 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
624
625 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
626 DocTestSuites.
627
628- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
629 that provide thread-local data.
630
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000631- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
632 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
633
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000634- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
635
636- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
637 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
638 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
639
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000640- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
641
642 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
643 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
644 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000645
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000646 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
647 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
648 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
649 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
650
651 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
652 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
653
654 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
655 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
656 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
657 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
658
659 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
660 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
661 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
662 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
663 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
664
665 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
666 wrapping help output.
667
668 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
669 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
670 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000671
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000672C API
673-----
674
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000675- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
676 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
677 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
678 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
679 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
680 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
681 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
682 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
683 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
684 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
685 its visible semantics have not changed.
686
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000687- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
688 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
689
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000690Documentation
691-------------
692
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000693- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000694
695 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000696 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000697
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000698 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000699
700 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
701
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000702- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000703
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000704Tests
705-----
706
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000707- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000708 platforms that use the Makefile.
709
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000710- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
711 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
712 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
713
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000714
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000715What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
716=================================
717
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000718*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000719
720Core and builtins
721-----------------
722
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000723- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
724 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
725 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
726 objects now (one object instead of three).
727
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000728- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
729 Windows DLLs.
730
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000731- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
732 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000733
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000734- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
735 a new .pyc magic.
736
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000737- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
738 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
739 be there.
740
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000741- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
742 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
743 the LC_NUMERIC category.
744
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000745- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
746 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
747 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
748
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000749- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
750
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000751- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
752 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
753 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000754
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000755- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
756 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
757
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000758- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
759
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000760- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000761 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000762
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000763- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
764
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000765- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
766
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000767- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
768 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
769
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000770- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
771 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
772 Fixes bug #858016 .
773
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000774- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
775 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
776 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
777
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000778- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
779 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
780 improves their performance (about 35%).
781
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000782- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
783 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
784 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
785
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000786- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
787 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
788 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
789 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
790
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000791- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
792 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
793 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
794 length is not known).
795
796- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
797 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000798 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
799 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000800 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
801
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000802- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
803 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
804
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000805- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
806 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
807 keyword arguments.
808
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000809- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
810 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
811 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
812
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000813- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
814 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
815 cases.
816
817- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
818 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
819 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
820 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
821 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
822 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
823 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
824 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
825 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
826 a release build.
827
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000828- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
829 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
830
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000831- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000832 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000833
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000834- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
835 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
836 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
837 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
838 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
839 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
840 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
841 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
842 destroyed.
843
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000844- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
845 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
846 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
847 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
848 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
849 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
850 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
851 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
852
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000853- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
854 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
855 character other than a space.
856
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000857- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
858 by the function object or by the method object, the function
859 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
860 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
861 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
862 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
863 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
864 attributes with the same name.
865
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000866- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
867 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
868 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
869 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
870 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
871 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
872 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
873 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
874 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
875 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
876 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
877 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
878 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
879 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000880
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000881- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
882 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
883 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
884 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
885 This has been repaired.
886
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000887- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
888
889- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
890
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000891- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
892 over a sequence.
893
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000894- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000895 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000896
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000897- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
898
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000899- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
900 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
901 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
902 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
903 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
904 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
905 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
906 records with equal keys is unchanged).
907
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000908- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
909 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
910 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
911
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000912- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
913 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
914 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
915 freelist.
916
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000917- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
918 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
919
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000920- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
921 number.
922
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000923- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
924 a TypeError exception.
925
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000926- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
927 820195.
928
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000929- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
930 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
931 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
932
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000933- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000934 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
935 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000936
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000937- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
938 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
939 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
940
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000941- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
942 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000943 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000944
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000945- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000946 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
947 the first call.
948
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000949
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000950Extension modules
951-----------------
952
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000953- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
954 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
955
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000956- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
957 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
958 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
959 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
960 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
961 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
962 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000963
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000964- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
965
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000966- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
967
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000968- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
969 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
970
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000971- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
972 fewer false positives.
973
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000974- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
975 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
976
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000977- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000978 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
979
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000980- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000981 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000982 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000983 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
984 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000985
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000986- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
987 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
988 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
989 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
990
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000991- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
992 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
993 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
994 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
995 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
996 #897625.
997
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000998- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
999 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1000
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001001- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1002 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1003 and pops on either side of the deque.
1004
1005- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1006 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1007
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001008- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1009 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1010 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1011 other functions that expect a function argument.
1012
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001013- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1014
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001015- os.getsid was added.
1016
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001017- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1018 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1019 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1020
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001021- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1022
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001023- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1024
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001025- readline.clear_history was added.
1026
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001027- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1028
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001029- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1030
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001031- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1032
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001033- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1034
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001035- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1036
1037- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1038
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001039- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1040
1041- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1042
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001043- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1044 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1045 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1046
1047- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1048 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1049 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1050 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1051 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1052 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1053 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1054
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001055- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1056 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1057 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1058 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001059
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001060- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001061 iterators from a single iterable.
1062
1063- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1064 of raising a TypeError exception.
1065
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001066- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1067 as parameter.
1068
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001069Library
1070-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001071
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001072- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1073 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1074 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001075
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001076- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1077 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1078 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001079
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001080- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001081
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001082- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1083 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001084
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001085- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1086 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1087
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001088- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1089
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001090- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001091 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001092
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001093- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001094 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001095
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001096- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1097
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001098- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1099 on cygwin and mingw32.
1100
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001101- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1102
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001103- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1104 module.
1105
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001106- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1107 installation scheme for all platforms.
1108
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001109- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001110 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001111
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001112- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1113 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1114 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1115
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001116- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1117 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1118 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1119
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001120- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1121
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001122- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1123
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001124- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1125 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1126
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001127- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1128 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1129 type pattern with the same value exists.
1130
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001131- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1132 when run from the command prompt).
1133
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001134- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1135 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1136
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001137- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1138 default sort).
1139
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001140- Added global runctx function to profile module
1141
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001142- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1143
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001144- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1145
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001146- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1147
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001148- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001149 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1150 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1151 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1152 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1153 accordingly.
1154
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001155- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1156 decoding standards.
1157
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001158- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1159 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1160 called for all requests.
1161
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001162- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1163 they are passed to the compiler.
1164
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001165- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1166 indent, width and depth.
1167
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001168- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1169 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1170
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001171- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1172 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1173
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001174- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1175
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001176- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1177
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001178- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1179
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001180- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1181 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1182
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001183- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001184 for better performance.
1185
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001186- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001187
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001188- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1189 a string).
1190
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001191- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1192
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001193- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1194
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001195- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1196
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001197- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1198
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001199- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1200 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1201 list of fieldnames.
1202
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001203- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1204 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1205
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001206- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1207
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001208- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1209 empty lists.
1210
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001211- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1212 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1213 and shelves.
1214
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001215- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1216 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1217
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001218- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001219 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1220 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001221
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001222- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1223 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001224 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001225
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001226- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001227 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1228 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1229
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001230- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1231 and removed in Py2.4.
1232
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001233- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1234
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001235- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1236
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001237Tools/Demos
1238-----------
1239
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001240- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1241 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1242
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001243- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1244
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001245- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1246 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1247 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1248 destination in situations where both files are given.
1249
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001250- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1251 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1252 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1253 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1254
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001255- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1256
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001257- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1258 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1259 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1260 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1261 now.
1262
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001263- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1264 in effect
1265
1266- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1267 C-c C-h
1268
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001269- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1270 -d option was given.
1271
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001272Build
1273-----
1274
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001275- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1276 build under OS X.
1277
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001278- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1279 --enable-profiling.
1280
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001281- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1282 is configured --with-tsc.
1283
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001284- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1285 on AMD64.
1286
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001287- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1288 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1289
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001290- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1291 removed.
1292
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001293- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1294 supported (see PEP 11).
1295
1296- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1297
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001298- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1299
1300- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1301 (see PEP 11).
1302
1303- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1304 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1305
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001306C API
1307-----
1308
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001309- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1310 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1311 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1312
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001313- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1314 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1315 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1316 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1317
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001318- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1319 generator objects.
1320
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001321- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1322 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001323 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1324 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001325
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001326- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1327 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1328
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001329- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1330 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1331 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1332 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1333 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1334
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001335- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1336 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1337 about 10% faster.
1338
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001339- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1340 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1341
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001342- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1343 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1344 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1345 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1346
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001347Windows
1348-------
1349
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001350- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1351 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1352 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1353 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1354
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001355- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1356 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1357 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1358
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001359
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001360What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1361===============================
1362
1363*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1364
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001365IDLE
1366----
1367
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001368- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1369 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1370 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1371 context-menu actions.
1372
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001373- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1374 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1375 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1376 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1377 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1378 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1379 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1380 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1381 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1382
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001383
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001384What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1385=============================================
1386
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001387*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001388
1389Core and builtins
1390-----------------
1391
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001392- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001393 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001394 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1395
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001396Extension modules
1397-----------------
1398
1399- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1400 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1401 than once. This has been fixed.
1402
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001403- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1404 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1405 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1406 call.
1407
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001408- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1409
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001410Library
1411-------
1412
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001413- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1414 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1415
1416- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1417 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1418 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1419 restored.
1420
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001421IDLE
1422----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001423
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001424- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001425
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001426Build
1427-----
1428
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001429- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1430 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1431
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001432C API
1433-----
1434
1435Windows
1436-------
1437
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001438- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1439 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1440
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001441- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1442
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001443Mac
1444---
1445
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001446- Various fixes to pimp.
1447
1448- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1449
1450- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1451 more problems than it solves.
1452
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001453
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001454What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1455=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001456
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001457*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1458
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001459Core and builtins
1460-----------------
1461
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001462- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1463 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1464
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001465- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1466 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001467 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001468
1469- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1470 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1471 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001472 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001473
1474- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1475 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001476
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001477- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1478 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1479 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1480
1481- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001482 770247.
1483
1484- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001485
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001486Extension modules
1487-----------------
1488
1489- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1490 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1491
1492- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1493
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001494- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1495
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001496- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1497 contained within the _strptime module.
1498
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001499- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1500 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1501
1502- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001503 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1504
1505- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1506 the find_class attribute, if present.
1507
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001508- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001509
1510 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1511 (SF bug 763298).
1512
1513 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001514 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1515 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1516 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001517
1518 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1519
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001520Library
1521-------
1522
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001523- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1524
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001525- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1526 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1527 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1528 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1529 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1530 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1531 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1532 or Tester().
1533
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001534- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1535 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1536 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1537 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1538 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1539 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1540 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1541 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1542 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001543
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001544 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001545
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001546- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1547 weren't before was an oversight.
1548
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001549- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1550 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1551
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001552- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1553 when there are no lines.
1554
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001555- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1556 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1557
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001558- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1559 to child processes.
1560
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001561- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1562
1563- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1564
1565- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1566 xmlrpclib.
1567
1568- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1569 responses.
1570
1571- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1572 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1573
1574- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1575 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1576 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1577
1578- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1579 used as patterns.
1580
1581- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1582 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1583 than Tk 8.3.
1584
1585- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1586
1587- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001588
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001589Tools/Demos
1590-----------
1591
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001592- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1593
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001594- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1595
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001596- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001597
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001598Build
1599-----
1600
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001601- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1602
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001603- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1604
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001605- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1606 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001607
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001608- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1609 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1610 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001611
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001612C API
1613-----
1614
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001615- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1616 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1617
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001618Windows
1619-------
1620
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001621- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1622 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1623 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1624 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1625 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1626 Python exception ::
1627
1628 thread.error: can't start new thread
1629
1630 is raised now.
1631
1632- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1633 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1634 instead of from DLL teardown.
1635
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001636Mac
1637---
1638
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001639- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001640 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001641 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1642 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1643 the executable in the bundle.
1644
1645- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001646
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001647- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1648
1649- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1650 on Panther.
1651
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001652What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1653================================
1654
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001655*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001656
1657Core and builtins
1658-----------------
1659
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001660- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1661 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1662 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1663 with the -i option.
1664
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001665- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1666 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1667
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001668- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1669 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1670
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001671- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1672 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1673 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1674 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1675 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1676 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1677 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1678 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1679 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1680 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1681 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1682 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1683 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001684
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001685- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1686 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1687 embedded in a lambda expression.
1688
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001689- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1690 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1691 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1692 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1693 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1694
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001695- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1696 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1697 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1698
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001699- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1700 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1701
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001702- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1703 It's writable again.
1704
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001705- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1706 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1707 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001708 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001709
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001710- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1711 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1712 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1713
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001714Extension modules
1715-----------------
1716
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001717- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1718 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1719
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001720- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1721 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1722 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1723 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1724
1725- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1726 collection.
1727
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001728- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1729 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1730 unique within a single program run.
1731
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001732- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1733 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1734
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001735- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1736 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1737
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001738- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1739 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001740
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001741- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1742
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001743- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1744 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1745
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001746- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1747 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1748 for many BSD-derived systems.
1749
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001750
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001751Library
1752-------
1753
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001754- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1755 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1756 primary ones:
1757
1758 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1759 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1760 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1761
1762 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1763 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1764 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1765 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1766 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1767 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1768
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001769- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1770 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1771 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1772 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1773 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1774 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1775 argument.
1776
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001777- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1778 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1779 in the archive.
1780
1781- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1782 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1783
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001784- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1785 569574).
1786
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001787- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1788 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1789 no more.
1790
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001791- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1792 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1793 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1794 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1795 code coverage.
1796
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001797- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1798 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1799 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001800 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1801 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001802
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001803- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1804 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1805 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001806 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001807
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001808- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1809
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001810- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1811 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1812 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1813 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1814
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001815- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1816 handling.
1817
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001818- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1819 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1820
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001821- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1822 in socket.py.
1823
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001824- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1825
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001826- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1827 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1828 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1829 opener with proxy support.
1830
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001831- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1832
1833- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1834
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001835Tools/Demos
1836-----------
1837
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001838- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1839
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001840- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1841
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001842- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1843 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001844
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001845- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1846 files.
1847
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001848Build
1849-----
1850
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001851- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001852 different root directory.
1853
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001854C API
1855-----
1856
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001857- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1858 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1859 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1860 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1861 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1862 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1863 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1864 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1865 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1866 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1867
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001868- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1869 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1870 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1871 from Python.
1872
1873
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001874New platforms
1875-------------
1876
1877None this time.
1878
1879Tests
1880-----
1881
1882- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1883 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1884
1885Windows
1886-------
1887
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001888- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1889
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001890- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1891 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1892 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1893 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1894 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1895 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1896 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1897 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1898 that's what it's for.
1899
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001900Mac
1901---
1902
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001903- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1904 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1905 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1906 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001907- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1908 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1909- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001910
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001911SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1912------------------------------------
1913
1914430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1915598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1916622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1917661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1918683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1919697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1920713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1921724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1922727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1923729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1924730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1925731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1926732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1927733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1928735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1929740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1930744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1931745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1932747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1933749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1934751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1935753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1936755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1937757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1938760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1939
1940
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001941What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1942================================
1943
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001944*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001945
1946Core and builtins
1947-----------------
1948
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001949- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1950 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1951
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001952- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1953 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1954 and cannot be strings).
1955
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001956- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1957 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1958 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1959 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1960
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001961- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1962 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1963 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1964 Python itself.
1965
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001966- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1967 the referenced object, if it has one.
1968
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001969- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1970 the thread started at
1971 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1972
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001973- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1974 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1975 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1976 placed on a list index.
1977
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001978- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1979 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1980 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1981 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1982
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001983- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1984 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1985 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1986 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1987 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1988 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1989 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1990
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001991- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1992 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1993 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1994 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1995 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1996
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001997- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1998 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001999
2000- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2001 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2002 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2003 #693195.)
2004
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002005- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2006 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002007
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002008- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002009 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002010 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2011 interpreter executions, would fail.
2012
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002013- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002014 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002015 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002016
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002017Extension modules
2018-----------------
2019
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002020- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2021 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2022 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2023 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2024
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002025- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2026 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2027
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002028- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2029 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2030 and Greg Chapman.)
2031
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002032- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2033 recursively.
2034
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002035- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002036 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2037 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2038 leaks.
2039
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002040- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2041
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002042- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2043 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2044 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2045 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2046 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2047 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2048 #705836.
2049
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002050- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002051 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2052
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002053- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2054 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2055 See SF bug #692416.
2056
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002057- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2058 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2059
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002060- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2061 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2062 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002063
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002064- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002065 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2066 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2067
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002068- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2069 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2070 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2071 timeouts to work properly.
2072
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002073Library
2074-------
2075
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002076- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2077 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2078 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2079 future release.
2080
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002081- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2082 for querying platform dependent features.
2083
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002084- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002085
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002086- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2087 pickle protocol versions.
2088
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002089- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2090 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2091 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2092
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002093- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2094
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002095- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2096 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2097 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2098 modules.
2099
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002100- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2101 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2102 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2103
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002104- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2105 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2106
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002107- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2108 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2109 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2110
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002111- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002112 MS Office extensions.
2113
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002114- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2115 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2116
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002117- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2118 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2119
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002120- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2121 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2122 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2123 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2124 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2125 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2126
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002127- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2128 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2129 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002130
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002131- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2132 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2133 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2134
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002135- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2136
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002137- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2138 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2139 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2140
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002141Tools/Demos
2142-----------
2143
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002144- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2145 See the module docstring for details.
2146
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002147Build
2148-----
2149
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002150- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2151 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002152
2153C API
2154-----
2155
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002156- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2157
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002158- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2159 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2160 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2161
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002162- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2163 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002164
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002165 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2166 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2167 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002168
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002169- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002170 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2171
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002172- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2173 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2174 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002175
2176New platforms
2177-------------
2178
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002179None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002180
2181Tests
2182-----
2183
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002184- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2185 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002186
2187Windows
2188-------
2189
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002190- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2191 function.
2192
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002193- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2194 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002195
2196Mac
2197---
2198
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002199- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2200 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002201
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002202- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2203 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002204
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002205- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2206 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2207 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002208
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002209- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002210 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2211 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002212
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002213- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2214 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002215
2216
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002217What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2218=================================
2219
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002220*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002221
2222Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002223-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002224
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002225- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2226 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2227 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2228
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002229- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2230 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2231 (SF patch #664376.)
2232
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002233- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2234 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2235 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2236 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2237 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2238 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002239 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002240
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002241- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2242 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2243 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2244 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002245 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002246
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002247- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2248 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2249 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2250 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2251 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2252 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2253 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2254 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2255 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2256 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2257 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2258
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002259- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2260 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2261 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2262 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2263 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2264 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2265
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002266- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2267 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2268
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002269- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2270 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2271 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2272 case.)
2273
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002274- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2275 passed as unicode strings.
2276
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002277- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2278 See SF bug #683467.
2279
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002280- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2281 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2282
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002283- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2284
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002285- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2286
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002287- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2288 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2289 arguments.
2290
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002291- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2292 See SF bug #667147.
2293
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002294- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002295 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002296 See SF bug #676155.
2297
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002298- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002299 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002300 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2301 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2302 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2303 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2304 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2305 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002306
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002307Extension modules
2308-----------------
2309
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002310- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2311 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2312 tp_as_number pointer.
2313
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002314- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2315 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2316 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2317 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2318 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2319
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002320- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2321
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002322- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2323
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002324- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002325 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002326 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2327 patch #678531.)
2328
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002329- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2330 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2331
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002332- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2333 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2334
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002335- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2336
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002337- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2338 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2339 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2340
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002341- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2342
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002343- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2344 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2345
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002346- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002347
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002348- datetime changes:
2349
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002350 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2351
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002352 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2353 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2354 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2355 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2356 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2357 now.
2358
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002359 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002360 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2361 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002362
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002363 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002364 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002365 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2366 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2367 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2368 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002369
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002370 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2371 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2372 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002373 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2374
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002375 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2376 by a later example coded by Guido.
2377
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002378 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002379 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2380 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2381 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002382 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2383 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2384
2385 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2386 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2387 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2388 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2389 tzinfo subclass instance.
2390
2391 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2392 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2393 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2394 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2395 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2396 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2397 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2398 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002399
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002400 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2401 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2402 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2403 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2404 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002405 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2406
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002407 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002408
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002409 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2410 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2411 as a naive datetime object.
2412
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002413 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2414 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2415 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2416
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002417 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2418 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2419 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2420 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2421 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2422 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2423 comparison.
2424
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002425 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2426 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2427 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2428 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002429 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002430
2431 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002432
2433 and ::
2434
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002435 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2436
2437 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2438 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2439 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2440 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2441
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002442 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2443 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2444 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2445 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2446 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2447
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002448 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2449 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002450 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2451 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002452
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002453Library
2454-------
2455
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002456- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2457 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2458
2459- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2460 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2461 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2462 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2463 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2464 See PEP 307 for details.
2465
2466- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2467 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2468
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002469- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2470 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002471 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002472 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2473 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002474 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002475
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002476- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2477 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2478
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002479- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2480 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2481 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2482
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002483- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2484
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002485- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2486 exception.
2487
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002488- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2489 class.
2490
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002491- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2492 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2493 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2494
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002495- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2496 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2497
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002498- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002499 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2500 See SF bug #659228.
2501
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002502- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2503 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2504 See SF patch #651082.
2505
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002506- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002507
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002508- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2509 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2510
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002511- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002512 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002513
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002514- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2515 DOS paths from other platforms.
2516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002517Tools/Demos
2518-----------
2519
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002520- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2521 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2522 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2523 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2524 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2525 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2526 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2527 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2528 example:
2529
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002530 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2531 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002532
2533 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2534
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002535
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002536Build
2537-----
2538
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002539- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2540 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2541 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002542 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2543
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002544 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2545
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002546- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2547 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2548 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2549 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2550 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2551 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2552 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2553 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2554 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2555
2556- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2557 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2558 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2559 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2560
2561- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2562 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2563
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002564C API
2565-----
2566
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002567- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2568 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002569
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002570- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2571 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2572 tp_as_number pointer.
2573
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002574- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2575 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2576 (SF #681367)
2577
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002578- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2579 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2580 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2581 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002582
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002583Tests
2584-----
2585
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002586- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002587 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2588 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2589 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2590 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2591 pydoc.)
2592
2593- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2594
2595- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002596
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002597Windows
2598-------
2599
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002600- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2601 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2602 time).
2603
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002604- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2605 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2606
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002607- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2608 release without strong cryptography.
2609
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002610- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002611 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002612
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002613- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2614 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2615
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002616Mac
2617---
2618
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002619- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2620 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002621
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002622- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2623 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2624 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002625
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002626- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2627 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002628
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002629- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2630 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2631 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2632 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002633
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002634- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002635 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2636 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2637 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002638
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002639
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002640What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002641=================================
2642
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002643*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002645Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002646--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002647
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002648- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2649
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002650- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2651 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002652 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002653 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002654 a different meaning than before.
2655
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002656- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002657 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002658 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002659
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002660- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002661 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002662 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002663
2664- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2665 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2666 and deallocation.
2667
2668- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2669 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2670
2671- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2672 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2673 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2674 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2675 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2676
2677- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2678 now detected by the garbage collector.
2679
2680- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2681 [SF bug 519621]
2682
2683- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2684 identifier.
2685
2686- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2687 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2688 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2689 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2690 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2691 [SF bug 563060]
2692
2693- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2694 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2695 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2696 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2697 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2698
2699- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2700 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2701 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2702
2703- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2704
2705- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2706 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2707 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2708 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2709 state of the slots would be lost.)
2710
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002711Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002712-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002713
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002714- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002715 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2716 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2717 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2718 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002719 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2720 Jython 2.1.
2721
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002722- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002723 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002724 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2725 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2726 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2727 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2728 these, see PEP 302.
2729
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002730- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2731 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2732 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2733
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002734- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2735 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2736 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2737
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002738- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2739 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2740 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2741
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002742- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2743 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2744 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2745 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2746 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2747 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2748 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2749 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2750 releases or implementations.
2751
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002752- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002753 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2754 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002755
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002756- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2757 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2758
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002759- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2760 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2761 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2762
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002763- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2764 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2765
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002766- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2767 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002768 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2769 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002770
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002771- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2772 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2773 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2774 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2775 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2776
2777 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2778 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2779 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2780 pattern.
2781
2782 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2783 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2784 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2785 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2786
2787 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2788 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2789 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2790 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2791 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2792 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2793
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002794- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2795 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2796 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2797 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2798 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2799 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2800 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2801 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002802
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002803- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2804 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2805 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2806 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2807 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002808 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2809 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2810 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2811 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2812 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2813 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2814 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002815
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002816- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2817 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2818
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002819- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2820 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2821 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2822 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2823 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2824 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2825 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2826 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2827 to Zack Weinberg!
2828
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002829- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2830 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2831 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2832 type. This has been fixed now.
2833
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002834- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2835 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2836 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2837
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002838- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2839 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2840 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2841 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2842 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2843 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2844 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2845 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002846 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002847
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002848- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2849 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2850 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002851
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002852- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2853 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2854 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2855 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2856 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2857 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2858 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2859 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002860 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002861 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2862 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2863
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002864- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2865 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2866 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2867 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2868 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2869 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2870 this.)
2871
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002872- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2873 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002874 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002875 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002876 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2877 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002878 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2879 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002880
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002881- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2882 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2883 currently running.
2884
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002885- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2886 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2887 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2888 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2889
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002890- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2891 as directory names.
2892
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002893- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2894 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2895
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002896- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2897 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2898
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002899- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002900 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2901 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002902
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002903- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2904 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2905 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2906 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2907 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2908
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002909- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2910 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2911 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2912 removed.
2913
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002914- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2915 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2916 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2917
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002918- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2919 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2920 to __debug__.
2921
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002922- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2923 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2924 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2925
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002926- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2927 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2928 deprecated now.
2929
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002930- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2931 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2932 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002933
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002934- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2935 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2936 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2937 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2938 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002939
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002940- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2941 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2942
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002943- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2944 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2945 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002946 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002947 is backward compatible.
2948
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002949- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2950 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2951 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2952 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2953 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2954
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002955- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2956 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2957 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2958 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2959 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2960 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002961
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002962- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2963 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2964
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002965- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2966 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2967
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002968- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2969 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2970 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2971 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2972 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2973
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002974- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2975 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2976 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2977
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002978- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002979 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2980
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002981- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2982 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2983 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002984
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002985- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2986 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2987
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002988- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2989 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2990 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2991
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002992- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2993
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002994Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002996
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002997- Added three operators to the operator module:
2998 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2999 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3000 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3001
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003002- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3003
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003004- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3005 archives.
3006
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003007- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3008 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3009 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3010
3011 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3012
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003013- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3014 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3015 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003016 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003017
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003018- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3019 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3020 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3021 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003022 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3023 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3024 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3025 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003026
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003027- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3028 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003029
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003030- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3031
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003032- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3033 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3034
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003035- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3036 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3037 supported.
3038
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003039- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3040
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003041- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3042 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003043
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003044- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3045 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3046
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003047- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3048
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003049- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3050 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3051
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003052- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3053 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3054 functions but callable type objects.
3055
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003056- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003057 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003058 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003059
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003060- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3061 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003062
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003063- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3064 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003065
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003066- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3067 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3068 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3069 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3070
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003071- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3072 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003073
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003074- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3075 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3076 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3077 and __imul__.
3078
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003079- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003080 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3081 is called.
3082
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003083- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3084 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3085 interpreter was compiled.
3086
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003087- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3088 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3089 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003090 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003091 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3092 1, not 2.
3093
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003094- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3095 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3096 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3097 limit.
3098
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003099- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3100 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3101 bug #623464.
3102
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003103- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3104 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3105 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3106 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3107
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003108Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003110
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003111- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3112
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003113- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3114 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3115 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3116 with Python 2.3a2.
3117
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003118- os.path exposes getctime.
3119
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003120- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003121 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003122 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003123 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003124 unit tests of floating point results.
3125
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003126- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3127 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3128 has been increased.
3129
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003130- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3131 executed.
3132
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003133- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3134 postinstallation script.
3135
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003136- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3137 test the current module.
3138
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003139- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003140 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3141 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3142 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3143 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3144
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003145- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003146 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003147 Ward's Optik package.
3148
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003149- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3150 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3151 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3152 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3153
3154- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3155 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003156 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003157
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003158- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3159 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3160 shelf are binary pickles.
3161
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003162- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3163 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3164
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003165- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3166 modules are iterators now.
3167
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003168- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3169 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3170 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3171 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3172 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3173 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003174
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003175- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3176 with their entity value.
3177
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003178- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3179
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003180- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3181 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003182
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003183- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3184 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003185 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003186
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003187- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3188 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3189 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3190 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3191 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3192 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3193 main():
3194
3195 import locale
3196 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3197
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003198- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3199 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3200
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003201- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3202 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3203 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3204 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3205 to the new standard.
3206
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003207- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3208 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3209 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3210 an extension to the database.
3211
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003212- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3213 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3214 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3215 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003216 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003217
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003218- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003219 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003220
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003221- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3222 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3223 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3224 bounded integers.
3225
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003226- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3227 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3228 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3229 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3230 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3231 in existence.
3232
3233 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3234 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3235 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3236 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3237 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3238 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3239
3240 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3241 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3242 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3243 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3244
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003245- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3246 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3247 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3248
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003249- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3250
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003251- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3252 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3253 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3254 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3255
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003256- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3257 argument.
3258
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003259- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3260 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3261 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3262 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3263 [SF patch 560794].
3264
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003265- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3266 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3267 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003268 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3269 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3270 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003271
3272- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3273 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003274
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003275- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3276 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3277 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3278 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003279
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003280- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3281 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3282 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3283 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3284 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3285
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003286- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003287
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003288- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3289
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003290- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3291 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3292 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3293 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3294 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3295 identical to None.
3296
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003297- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3298 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3299 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3300 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3301 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3302 results now.
3303
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003304- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3305 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3306
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003307- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3308 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3309 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3310 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3311 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3312 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3313 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3314 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3315
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003316- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3317
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003318- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3319 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3320
3321- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3322 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3323 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3324 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3325 and other systems.
3326
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003327- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3328 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3329 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3330 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 +00003331 work well with these.
3332
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003333- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3334
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003335- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003336 connections.
3337
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003338- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3339 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3340 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3341
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003342- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3343 sets
3344
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003345- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3346 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3347 name.
3348
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003349- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3350 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3351 passed in.
3352
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003353- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003354 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003355 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3356 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003357
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003358- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3359
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003360- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3361
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003362- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3363 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3364 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3365
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003366- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3367 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3368 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3369 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003370 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003371
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003372- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003373 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003374 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003375
3376- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3377 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3378 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3379
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003380- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003381 the value of its expression argument.
3382
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003383- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3384 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3385 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3386
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003387- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3388 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3389 skipstone browser was included.
3390
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003391- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3392 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3393
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003394Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003396
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003397- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3398 names in addition to accepting file names.
3399
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003400- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3401 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3402 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3403 still used and useful.)
3404
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003405- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3406 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3407 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3408 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003409
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003410- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3411 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3412 the generated binary.
3413
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003414Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003415-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003416
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003417- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3418
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003419- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3420 except in the hands of experts.
3421
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003422- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003423 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3424 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3425 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003426
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003427- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3428 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3429 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3430 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3431 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3432 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3433 builds.
3434
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003435- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3436 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3437 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3438 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3439 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3440 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3441 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3442 new type.
3443
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003444- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003445
3446 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3447 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3448 positive infinities.
3449
3450 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3451 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3452 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3453 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3454 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3455 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3456 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3457
3458 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3459
3460 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3461
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003462- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3463 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3464 size of the executable.
3465
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003466- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3467 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3468 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3469 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003470
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003471- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3472
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003473- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3474 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3475 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003476
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003477- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3478 well as Unix.
3479
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003480- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3481 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3482 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3483 modules in the README file for details.
3484
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003485C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003487
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003488- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3489 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003490 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003491 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003492 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003493
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003494- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3495 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3496 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3497 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3498 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3499 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003500 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003501 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3502 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3503 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3504 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3505 aligned.)
3506
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003507- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3508 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3509 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3510
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003511- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3512 level.
3513
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003514- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3515 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3516 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3517 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3518 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3519
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003520- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3521 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3522 code.
3523
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003524- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3525 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3526 adjusting for negative indices.
3527
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003528- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3529 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3530 object.
3531
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003532- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3533 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3534 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3535
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003536- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3537 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003538
3539- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3540
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003541- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3542 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3543 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3544 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3545
3546- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3547
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003548- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003549
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003550- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003551 without going through the buffer API.
3552
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003554
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003555- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3556 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3557 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3558 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3559
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003560- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3561 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3562
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003563- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003564 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003566New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003568
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003569- OpenVMS is now supported.
3570
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003571- AtheOS is now supported.
3572
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003573- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3574
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003575- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3576
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003577Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-----
3579
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003580- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3581 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3582 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003583
3584Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003586
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003587- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3588 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3589 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3590 bugs.
3591 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003592 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003593 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3594 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003595 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003596
3597- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003598 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003599
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003600- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3601 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3602
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003603- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3604 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003605 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003606 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3607
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003608- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3609 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3610 use files" uninstall option).
3611
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003612- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3613
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003614- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3615 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3616
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003617- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3618 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3619 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3620
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003621- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3622 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3623 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3624 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3625 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003626 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3627 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3628 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003629
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003630- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003631 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003632 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3633 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3634 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3635 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3636 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3637 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3638 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3639 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3640 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3641 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3642 work around.
3643
3644- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3645 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3646 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3647 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3648 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3649 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3650 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3651 specified with O_CREAT too).
3652
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003653Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654----
3655
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003656- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003657
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003658- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3659 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3660 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3661
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003662- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3663 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3664 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3665
3666- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3667 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3668 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3669 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3670 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3671 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3672 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3673 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003674
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003675- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3676 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3677 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003678
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003679- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3680 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3681 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3682 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3683 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003684
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003685- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3686 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3687 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003688
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003689- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3690 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003691
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003692- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3693 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3694 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3695 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3696 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003697
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003698- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3699 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3700 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3701
3702- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3703 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3704 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003705
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003706- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3707 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3708 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3709 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003710 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003711
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003712- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3713 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003714
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003715- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3716 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003717
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003718- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003719 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003720 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3721 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003722
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003723
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003724What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003725===============================
3726
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3728
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003729Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003731
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003732- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3733 with a custom metaclass.
3734
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003735Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003737
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003738- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3739 are proxies.
3740
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003741Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003743
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003744- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3745 very short strings.
3746
3747- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3748 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3749 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3750 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3751 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3752
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003753Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003755
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003756- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3757 close or delete time).
3758
3759- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3760 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3761
3762- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3763
3764- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003765 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003766
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003767Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003769
3770Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003772
3773C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003775
3776New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003778
3779Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003781
3782Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003784
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003785- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3786
3787- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3788 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3789
3790- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3791 deleted at process exit time.
3792
3793- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3794 in backslash.
3795
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003796Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003798
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003799- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3800 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3801 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3802
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003803
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003804What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003805===========================
3806
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003807*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3808
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003809Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003811
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003812- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3813 been extensively updated. See
3814
3815 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3816
3817 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3818
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003819- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3820 deleted!
3821
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003822- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3823 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3824 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3825 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3826 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3827
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003828- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3829
3830 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3831 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3832
3833 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3834 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3835 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3836 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3837 supported anyway.
3838
3839 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3840 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3841
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003842- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3843 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3844 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3845 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3846 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003847
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003848- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3849 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3850 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3851
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003852Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003854
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003855- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3856 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3857 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3858 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3859 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3860 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003861 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3862 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3863 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3864 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003865
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003866- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3867 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3868 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003870Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003872
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003873- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3874
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003875Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003877
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003878- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3879 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3880 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3881 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3882 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3883 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3884
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003885- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3886
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003887- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3888
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003889- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3890
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003891- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3892 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3893 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3894
3895- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3896
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003897Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003899
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003900- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3901 off a search on Google.
3902
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003903Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003904-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003905
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003906- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3907 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3908 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3909 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3910 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3911 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3912 other platforms should do likewise.
3913
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003914- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3915 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3916 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3917
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003918C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003920
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003921- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3922 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3923 producing key-value pairs.
3924
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003925- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003926 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003927 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3928 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3929 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3930 previously went unchallenged.
3931
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003932New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003934
3935Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003937
3938Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003940
3941Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003943
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003944- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3945 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003946
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003947- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3948 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3949 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3950 home.
3951
3952
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003953What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003954===========================
3955
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3957
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003958Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003960
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003961- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3962 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003963
3964 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003965 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003966
3967 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3968 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003969 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003970 This needs to be documented.
3971
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003972- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3973 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3974
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003975- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3976 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3977 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3978
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003979- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3980 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3981
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003982- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3983 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3984 class forbids it).
3985
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003986- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3987 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3988 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3989
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003990- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3991
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003992Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003994
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003995- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3996 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003997 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003998
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003999- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4000 (like 1 + '').
4001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004002Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004004
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004005- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4006 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4007 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4008 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004009 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004010 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4011
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004012- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4013 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4014 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4015 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4016
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004017- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4018 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004019 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4020 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4021 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004022
4023- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4024 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004025
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004026- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4027 bytes on its input.
4028
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004029Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004031
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004032- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004033 convenience function.
4034
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004035- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4036 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4037 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004038 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4039 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4040 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4041 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4042 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4043 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004044
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004045- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4046 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4047 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4048 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4049
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004050- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4051 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4052 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4053
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004054- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4055 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4056 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4057 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4058
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004059- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4060 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004062 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4063 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4064 new -l and -e options.
4065
4066- statcache is now deprecated.
4067
4068- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4069 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004071 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4072 time properly taken into account.
4073
4074- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4075 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4076 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4077 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4078
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004079Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004081
4082Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004084
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004085- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4086 is built with libdb3 if available.
4087
4088- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004090C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004092
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004093- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4094 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4095 PySequence_Size().
4096
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004097- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4098
4099- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4100 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4101 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4102
4103- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4104 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4105
4106- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4107 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4108
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004109New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004111
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004112- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4113 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4114
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004115- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4116 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4117
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004118- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4119
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004120Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004122
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004123- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4124 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4125
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004126Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004128
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004129Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004131
4132- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4133 removed completely in the next release.
4134
4135- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4136 OSX.
4137
4138- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4139 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4140
4141- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4142
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004143
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004144What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004145===========================
4146
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4148
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004149Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004151
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004152- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004153 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004154 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004155 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4156 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004157 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4158 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004159 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4160 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004161
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004162- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4163 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4164
4165- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4166 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4167
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004168Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004170
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004171- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4172 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4173 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4174 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4175 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4176 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4177 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4178 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4179
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004180- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4181 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4182 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4183 example).
4184
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004185- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004186 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004187 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004188 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004189
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004190- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4191 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4192 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004193 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004194
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004195- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4196 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4197 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4198 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4199 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4200 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4201
4202 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4203
4204 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4205
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004206Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004208
4209- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4210
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004211- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4212
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004213- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4214 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004215
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004216- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4217 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4218 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4219 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4220 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4221 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004222 attributes.
4223
4224- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4225 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4226 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004227
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004228- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4229 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4230 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004231
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004232- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4233 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4234 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004235 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4236 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4237
4238- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4239 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004240
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004241Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004243
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004244- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4245 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4246
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004247- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4248 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4249 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4250 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4251
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004252- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4253 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4254 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4255 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4256
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004257 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4258 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4259 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4260 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4261 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4262 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4263 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4264 without losing information).
4265
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004266- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004267 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4268 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4269 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4270 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4271 module).
4272
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004273 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004274 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4275 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4276 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4277 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004278
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004279- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004280 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4281 encoding.
4282
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004283- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4284 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4285
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004287 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4288
4289- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4290 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4291 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4292 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4293
4294- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4295
4296- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4297 ON, and OFF.
4298
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004299- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4300 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4301
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004302Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004304
4305- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4306 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4307 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004308
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004309- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4310 been added: -X and -E.
4311
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004312Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004314
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004315- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4316 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4317
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004318C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004320
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004321- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4322 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4323 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4324 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4325 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4326
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004327- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4328 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4329 as long) arguments.
4330
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004331- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4332 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4333 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4334 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4335 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4336 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4337
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004338- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4339 input.
4340
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004341New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004343
4344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004346
4347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004349
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004350- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4351 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4352 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4353
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004354- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4355 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4356 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004357 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4360 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4361 import signal
4362 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004363
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004365 while 1:
4366 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004368 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4369 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4370 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4371 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004372
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004373
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004374What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4375===========================
4376
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4378
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004379Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004381
4382- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4383 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4384 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4385
4386- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4387 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4388 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4389 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4390 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4391 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4392 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004393
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004394- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004395 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004396 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4397 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4398 associate a docstring with a property.
4399
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004400- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4401 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4402 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4403 other built-in object types.
4404
4405- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4406 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4407 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4408 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4409 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4410
4411- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4412 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4413
4414- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4415 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004416 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004417 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4418 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4419 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4420 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4421 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4422
4423- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4424 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4425 class.
4426
4427- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4428 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4429 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4430 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4431
4432- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4433 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4434 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4435 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4436
4437- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4438 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4439
4440- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4441 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4442 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4443 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4444 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004445 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004446 with the same value as s.
4447
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004448- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4449
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004450Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004452
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004453- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4454
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004455- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4456 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4457 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4458 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4459 objects.
4460
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004461- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4462 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004463 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4464 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4465
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004466- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4467 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4468 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004470Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004472
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004473- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4474 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4475 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4476 by the instances.
4477
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004478- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4479 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4480 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4481
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004482- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4483 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4484 before the entire comparison is complete.
4485
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004486- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4487 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4488 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4489
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004490- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4491 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4492 getwriter().
4493
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004494- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4495 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4496
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004497- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004498 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4499 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4500
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004501- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4502 iterable object.
4503
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004504- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4505 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004506
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004507- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4508 authentication.
4509
4510- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4511 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004512
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004513- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004514 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4515 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4516 a sample driver.)
4517
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004518Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004520
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004521- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4522 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4523 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4524 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4525 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4526 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4527 kernel has large file support.
4528
4529- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4530 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4531 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4532 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4533 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4534
4535- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4536 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4537 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4538
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004539C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004541
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004542- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4543 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4544
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004545New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004547
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004548- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4549 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004551Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004553
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004554- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4555 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4556 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4557 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4558 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4559
4560- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4561 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4562 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4563 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4564
4565- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4566 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4567
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004568Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004570
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004571- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004572 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4573 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004574
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004575
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004576What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4577===========================
4578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4580
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004581Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004583
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004584- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4585 big to represent as a C double.
4586
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004587- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4588 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4589 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4590 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4591 restriction).
4592
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004593- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4594 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4595 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4596 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4597 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4598
4599 >>> dir([])
4600 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4601 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4602 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4603 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4604 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4605 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4606 'reverse', 'sort']
4607
4608 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4609
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004610- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004611 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4612 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4613 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4614 OverflowError exception.
4615
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004616- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004617 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004618 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4619 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4620 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4621 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4622 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004623 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4625 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4626
4627 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4628 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4629 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4630 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004631
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004632- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004633 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4634 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4635 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4636 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4637 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4638 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4639 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4640 once it is created.
4641
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004642- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4643 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4644 (key, value) pairs.
4645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004646- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004647 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4648 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4649
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004650- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4651 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4652 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4653 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4654 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004655
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004656- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004657 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4658 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4659
4660 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4661
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004662- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004663 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4664
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004667
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004668- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004669 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4670 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004671
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004672- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4673 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4674 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4675 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4676 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4677 in this area anymore).
4678
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004679- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4680 threading.Timer.
4681
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004682- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4683 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4684
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004685- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004686 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4687
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004688- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004689 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4690 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4691 converted to Python longs.
4692
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004693- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004694 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4695
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004696- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4697 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4698 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4699
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004700Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004702
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004703- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4704 division operators as per PEP 238.
4705
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004706Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004708
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004709- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4710 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4711 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4712 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4713
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004714C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004716
4717- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004718
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004719- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4720 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004721 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4724 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004725 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004727
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004728- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004729 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4730 module:
4731
4732 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004733
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004734 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4735 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004736
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004737 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4738 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004739
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004740 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4741
4742 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4743
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004744- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004745 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4746 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4747 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004748
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004749New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004751
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004752- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4753 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4754 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4755 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4756 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004757
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004758Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004760
4761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004763
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004764- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4765 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4766 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4767 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004768 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4769 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4770 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4771 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4772 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004773
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004774- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004775 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4776
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004777
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004778What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4779===========================
4780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4782
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004783Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004785
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004786- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4787 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4788
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004789- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4790 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4791 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004792
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004793- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4794 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4795 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4796 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004797
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004798- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4799
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004801
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004802Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004804
4805- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004806 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004807 the module docstring for details.
4808
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004809Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004811
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004812- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004813 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4814 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4815 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004816
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004817- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4818 Nick Mathewson.
4819
4820Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004822
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004823- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4824 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4825 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4826 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4827 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4828 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4829 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4830 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4831
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004832- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4833 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4834 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4835 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4836
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004837- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4838 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4839 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4840 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4841 come a long way).
4842
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004843- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4844 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4845 write filters for these warnings).
4846
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004847- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4848 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4849 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4850 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4851 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4852
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004853- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4854 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4855 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4856 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4857 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4858 older distribution.
4859
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004860Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004862
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004863- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4864 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004865 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004866
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004867- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4868 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4869 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4870
4871- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4872
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004873- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4874
4875- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4876
4877- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004880
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004881- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4882
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004883New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004885
4886C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004888
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004889- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4890 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4891 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4892 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4893 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4894 against buffer overruns.
4895
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004896- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004897 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4898 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004899 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4900 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4901 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4902
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004903- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4904 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4905 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4906 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4907 deprecated.
4908
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004909Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004911
4912- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4913 relevant is found.
4914
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004915
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004916What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004917===========================
4918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4920
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004921Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004923
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004924- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4925 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4926 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4927 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4928 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4929 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4930 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4931 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004932 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004933 repaired.
4934
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004935- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004936 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004937 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4938 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4939 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4940 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4941 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4942 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4943 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4944 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4945
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004946- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4947 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4948 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4949 leading BMO character).
4950
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004951- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4952 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4953 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4954
4955 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4956 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4957 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004958
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004959 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4960 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4961 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4962 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4963 for various simple to use conversions.
4964
4965 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4966 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4967
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4969 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4970 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4971 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4972 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4973 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4974 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4975 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4976 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4977 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4978 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4979 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4980 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4981 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4982 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004983
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004984- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4985 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4986 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004987 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004988 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004989
4990 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004991 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4992 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4993 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4994 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4995 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004996 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4997 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004998
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004999 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5000 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5001 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005002 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005003
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005004- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5005 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5006 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5007 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5008 floating arithmetic,
5009
5010 x = 9007199254740992.0
5011 print long(x)
5012
5013 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5014 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5015 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5016 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5017 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5018 functions are of good quality).
5019
5020 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5021 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5022 algorithms to break.
5023
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005024- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5025 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5026 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5027 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5028 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5029 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5030 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5031 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5032 order.
5033
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005034- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5035 operation along the most common code paths.
5036
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005037- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5038 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5039
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005040- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5041 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5042 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5043 {}.update(UserDict())
5044
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005045- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5046 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5047 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5048 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5049 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5050 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5051 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5052 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5053
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005054- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005055 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005057 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005058 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5059 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005060 join() method of strings
5061 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005062 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5063 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005065 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005066
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005067- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5068 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5069
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005070- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5071 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5072
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005073- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5074 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5075 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5076 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5077
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005078- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5079 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005080 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005081 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5082 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005083
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005084- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5085
5086
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005087Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005089
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005090- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005091 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005092 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5093 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5094
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005095- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5096 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5097
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005098- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5099 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5100 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5101 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5102
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005103- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5104 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5105 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5106
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005107- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5108
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005109- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5110
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005111- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5112 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5113 that are still imported into string.py).
5114
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005115- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5116
5117- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5118 Now it does.
5119
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005120- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5121
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005122- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5123 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5124 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5125 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5126 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005127 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5128 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005129
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005130- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5131 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5132 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5133 'help(object)'.
5134
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005135Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005136-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005137
5138- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005139 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005140 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5141 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5142
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005143- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005144 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5145 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005146
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005147C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005149
5150- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5151 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152
5153----
5154
5155**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**