blob: c140d7c1fe6ca3fee268f143e4556bec07656b8d [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000015- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
16
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000017- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
18 and long longs.
19
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000020- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
21 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
22 message in this case.
23
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000024- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
25 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
26 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
27 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
28 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
29
30- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
31
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000032- Speed up some Unicode operations.
33
34- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
35
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000036- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000037 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
38
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000039- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
40
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000041- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
42 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
43
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000044- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
45
46- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
47
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000048- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
49 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
50 was empty.
51
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000052- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
53 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
54
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000055- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000056 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000057
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000058- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
59 codes.
60
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000061- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
62 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
63 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
64
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000065- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
66 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
67
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000068- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000069 (fixes bug #1119418).
70
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000071- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
72
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000073- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
74 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
75
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000076- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
77 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
78 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
79
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000080- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
81
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000082- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
83 reference counts in some error exit cases.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
86 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
87 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
88 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
89 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
90 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
91 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
92 realloc.
93
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000094- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
95 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
96
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000097- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
98 like their int counterparts.
99
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000100- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
101 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
102 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
103 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
104 for a longer write-up of the problem).
105
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000106- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
107 serializing floats.
108
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000109- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
110 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
111 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
112
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000113- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
114 278.
115
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
117 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
118 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
119 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000120 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000121 PyNumber_*().
122 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
123
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000124- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
125 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
126 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
127 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
128
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000129- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
130 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
131 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
132 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
133 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
134
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000135- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
136 disabled caused a crash.
137
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000138- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
139 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
140
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000141- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000142 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
143
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000144- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
145
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000146- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000147 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
148 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
149 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000150
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000151- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
152
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000153- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
154 returning None.
155
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000156- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000157 ('\') with a specific error message.
158
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000159- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
160
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000161- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
162 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000165 an ferror() call.
166
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000167- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
168 list.sort().
169
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000170- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
171 (2+3) --> (5).
172
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000173- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
174
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000175- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
176 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000178- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
179 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
180 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
181
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000182- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
183 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
184 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
185
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000186Extension Modules
187-----------------
188
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000189- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
190
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000191- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
192
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000193- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
194
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000195- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
196 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
197
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000198- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
199
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000200- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
201 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
202
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000203- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
204
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000205- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
206 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
207
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000208- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
209 returns in cStringIO.c.
210
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000211- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
212 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
213
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000214- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
215
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000216- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
217
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000218- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
219 the file system encoding.
220
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000221- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
222 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000223
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000224- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
225
226- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000227 line without newlines.
228
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000229- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
230 on Windows.
231
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000232- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000233 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
234
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000235- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
236 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
237 for large or negative values.
238
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000239- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000240 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000241
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000242- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
243
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000244- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
245 if available on the platform.
246
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000247- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
248 available on the platform.
249
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000250- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
251 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
252
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000253- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
254
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000255- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
256 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
257 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
258
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000259- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
260
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000261- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
262 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
263
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000264- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000265 file size.
266
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000267- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
268
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000269- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
270 {remove_history,replace_history}
271
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000272- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
273 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000274
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000275- stat_float_times is now True.
276
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000277- array.array objects are now picklable.
278
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000279- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
280 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
281
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000282- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
283 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
284 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
285
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000286- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
287 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000288
289Library
290-------
291
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000292- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
293
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000294- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
295
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000296- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
297 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
298 illegal argument)
299
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000300- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
301 is an error in the format string.
302
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000303- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
304
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000305- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000306 "parent" argument.
307
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000308- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
309 for padding.
310
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000311- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
312 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
313
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000314- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
315 to get the correct encoding.
316
317- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
318 languages.
319
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000320- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
321
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000322- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
323
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000324- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
325
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000326- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
327 functionality.
328
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000329- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
330
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000331- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
332 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
333
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000334- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
335 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
336 match the Content-Length header.
337
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000338- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
339
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000340- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
341 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000342 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000343
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000344- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
345
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000346- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
347
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000348- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
349 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
350
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000351- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
352 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
353 Tkdnd.
354
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000355- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
356 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
357
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000358- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
359 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
360
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000361- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000362 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
363
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000364- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
365 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
366
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000367- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
368 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
369
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000370- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000371 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000372
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000373- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
374
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000375- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
376 error messages.
377
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000378- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
379
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000380- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
381 Bug #1224621.
382
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000383- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
384 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
385 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
386 terminates by raising StopIteration.
387
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000388- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
389
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000390- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
391 component of the path.
392
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000393- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
394 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
395 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
396 class at all.
397
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000398- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
399 files to PyPI.
400
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000401- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
402 them to PyPI.
403
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000404- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
405 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
406 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
407 work as expected.
408
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000409- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
410 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
411
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000412- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000413 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
414
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000415- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
416
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000417- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
418 to build.
419
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000420- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
421 symbolic links on Windows.
422
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000423- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000424 profile.py if available.
425
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000426- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
427
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000428- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
429 in LWPCookieJar.
430
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000431- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
432
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000433- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
434
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000435- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
436
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000437- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
438
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000439- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
440
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000441- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
442
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000443- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
444
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000445- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
446
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000447- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
448 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
449 be exploited in various ways.
450
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000451- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
452 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
453
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000454- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
455
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000456- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
457
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000458- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
459
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000460- Enhancements to the csv module:
461
462 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000463 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000464 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000465 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
466 reporting.
467 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
468 dictates.
469 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000470 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000471 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000472 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
473 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000474 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
475 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000476 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000477 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
478 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
479 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
480 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
481 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
482 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
483 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
484 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
485 without first creating a dialect class.
486 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
487 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
488 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000489 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000490 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
491 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000492 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
493 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
494 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
495 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000496 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
497 This has been fixed.
498
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000499- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
500 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
501 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
502 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
503
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000504- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
505
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000506- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
507 (Bug #951915).
508
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000509- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
510 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
511 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000512 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000513
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000514- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
515
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000516- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
517 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
518
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000519- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
520
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000521- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
522
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000523- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
524
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000525- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
526
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000527- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
528
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000529- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
530 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
531 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
532
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000533- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000534 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000535
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000536- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
537 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
538 tokenizer with very long source lines.
539
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000540- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
541 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
542
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000543- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
544 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000545
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000546- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
547 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
548
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000549- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
550 correctly.
551
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000552- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
553 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
554 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
555 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
556 between two lines.
557
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000558- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
559 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
560 handlers.
561
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000562- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000563 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
564 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000565
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000566- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
567 considering it exactly like a '*'.
568
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000569- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
570 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000571
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000572- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
573
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000574Build
575-----
576
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000577- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
578 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
579
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000580- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
581 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
582
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000583- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
584 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
585 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000586 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000587
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000588- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
589 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
590 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
591
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000592- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
593
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000594- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
595 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
596
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000597- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
598 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
599 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
600 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
601 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
602 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
603 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
604 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
605
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000606- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
607 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
608 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
609 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
610
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000611
612C API
613-----
614
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000615- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
616
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000617- Removed PyRange_New().
618
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000619- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
620 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
621 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
622 mappings.
623
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000624
625Tests
626-----
627
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000628- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000629
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000630
631Documentation
632-------------
633
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000634- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
635
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000636- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
637
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000638- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
639
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000640- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
641
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000642- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
643
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000644- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
645
646- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
647
648- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
649
650- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
651
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000652- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
653 Closes bug #1166582.
654
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000655- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
656 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
657 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
658
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000659Mac
660---
661
662
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000663New platforms
664-------------
665
666- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
667
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000668
669Tools/Demos
670-----------
671
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000672- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
673 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
674 source files that need an encoding declaration.
675 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
676
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000677- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
678
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000679- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000680
681
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000682What's New in Python 2.4 final?
683===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000684
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000685*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000686
687Core and builtins
688-----------------
689
690- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
691 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
692 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
693
694
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000695What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
696==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000697
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000698*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000699
700Core and builtins
701-----------------
702
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000703- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
704 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
705 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
706
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000707
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000708Library
709-------
710
711- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
712 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
713 raised is re-raised.
714
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000715- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
716 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
717
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000718- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
719 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
720 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
721 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
722 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
723 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
724 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
725 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
726 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
727 by the slice are recomputed now.
728
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000729- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000730
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000731Build
732-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000733
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000734- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
735 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
736 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000737
738C API
739-----
740
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000741- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
742
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000743
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000744What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
745================================
746
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000747*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000748
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000749License
750-------
751
752The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
753is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
754changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
755Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
756intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
757durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
758the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
759License::
760
761 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
762
763says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
764to Python 2.1.1.
765
766The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
767License Version 2.
768
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000769Core and builtins
770-----------------
771
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000772- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
773 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
774 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
775 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
776 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
777 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
778 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000779 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000780 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
781 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
782
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000783- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000784
785Extension Modules
786-----------------
787
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000788- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
789 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
790 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
791 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000792
793Library
794-------
795
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000796- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
797 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
798 returned.
799
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000800- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
801
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000802- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
803 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
804
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000805- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
806
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000807- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
808 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000809
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000810- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
811
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000812- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
813
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000814- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000815 the source code is updated and reloaded.
816
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000817Build
818-----
819
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000820- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000821
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000822What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
823================================
824
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000825*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000826
827Core and builtins
828-----------------
829
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000830- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000831 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
832
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000833- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
834 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
835 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
836 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
837
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000838- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
839 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
840
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000841- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
842 constant.
843
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000844- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
845 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
846 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
847 large), and to anomalies such as
848 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
849 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
850 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
851 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000852
853Extension modules
854-----------------
855
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000856- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
857 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000858 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
859 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
860 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000861
862Library
863-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000864
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000865- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000866 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000867 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
868 --swig-cpp.
869
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000870- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
871 it is set.
872
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000873- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000874
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000875- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
876 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
877 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
878 Closes bug #1039270.
879
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000880- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000881
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000882 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000883 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
884 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
885 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
886 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
887 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
888 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
889 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
890 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
891 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
892 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
893 + Updates to documentation.
894
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000895- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
896 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
897 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
898 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
899
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000900- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000901
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000902- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
903 applications should use the getmember function.
904
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000905- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
906
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000907- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
908 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
909 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
910 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
911 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
912 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
913 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
914 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
915 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
916
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000917- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
918 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000919 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000920
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000921- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
922 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
923 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
924 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
925 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
926 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
927 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
928 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000929
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000930- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
931 the new public features (of which there are many).
932
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000933- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000934 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
935 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
936 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
937 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000938 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000939
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000940- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
941
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000942- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
943 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
944 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
945 options.
946
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000947- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
948 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
949 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
950 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
951 conditions under which non-string values work.
952
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000953Build
954-----
955
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000956- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
957 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
958 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
959
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000960- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
961 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
962 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
963 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
964 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000965
966C API
967-----
968
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000969- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
970 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
971
972- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
973
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000974- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
975 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
976 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
977 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
978 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
979 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
980 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
981 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
982 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
983
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000984- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
985
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000986- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
987 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
988 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000989
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000990Tests
991-----
992
993- test__locale ported to unittest
994
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000995Mac
996---
997
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000998- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
999 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1000 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001001
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001002Tools/Demos
1003-----------
1004
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001005- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1006 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1007 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1008 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1009 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001010
1011
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001012What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1013=================================
1014
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001015*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001016
1017Core and builtins
1018-----------------
1019
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001020- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001021 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1022
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001023- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1024 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1025 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1026 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1027 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1028 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1029 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1030 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001031 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1032 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1033 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1034 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1035 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001036
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001037- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1038 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1039 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1040 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1041 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1042
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001043- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1044
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001045- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1046 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1047
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001048- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1049 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1050 modified the list.
1051
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001052- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1053 functions is now writable.
1054
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001055- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1056 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1057 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1058 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1059
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001060- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1061 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1062 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1063 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1064 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001065
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001066- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1067 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1068
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001069Extension modules
1070-----------------
1071
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001072- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1073
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001074- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1075 data.
1076
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001077- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1078 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1079 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1080 supposed to have been truncated away.
1081
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001082- Added socket.socketpair().
1083
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001084- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1085 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1086
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001087- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001088 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1089
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001090Library
1091-------
1092
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001093- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001094 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001095
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001096- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1097 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1098
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001099- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1100 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1101
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001102- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1103
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001104- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1105 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001106
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001107- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1108 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1109
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001110- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1111
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001112- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1113
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001114- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1115
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001116- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1117 Percivall.
1118
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001119- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1120 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1121
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001122- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1123 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1124 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001125 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001126
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001127- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1128 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1129 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1130 and exponent.
1131
1132- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1133
1134- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001135 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001136 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1137
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001138- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1139 to the readline module.
1140
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001141- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001142 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1143 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001144
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001145- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1146 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1147 contains symlinks.
1148
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001149- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1150 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1151
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001152- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1153 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1154 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1155
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001156- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1157 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1158 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1159 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1160 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1161 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1162 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1163 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1164 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1165 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1166 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1167 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1168 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1169
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001170- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1171
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001172Tools/Demos
1173-----------
1174
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001175- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1176 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1177
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001178- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1179
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001180Build
1181-----
1182
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001183- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1184 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1185 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1186 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1187 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1188 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1189 plans to do so.
1190
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001191- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1192 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1193
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001194- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1195 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1196
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001197- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1198 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1199
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001200- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1201 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1202
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001203- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1204 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1205
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001206C API
1207-----
1208
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001209..
1210
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001211Documentation
1212-------------
1213
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001214- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1215 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1216
1217- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1218 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1219 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001220
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001221New platforms
1222-------------
1223
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001224- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1225
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001226Tests
1227-----
1228
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001229..
1230
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001231Windows
1232-------
1233
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001234- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1235 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1236 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1237 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1238 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1239 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1240 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1241 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1242 the problem.
1243
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001244Mac
1245---
1246
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001247..
1248
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001249
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001250What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1251=================================
1252
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001253*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001254
1255Core and builtins
1256-----------------
1257
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001258- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1259 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1260 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1261 sensitive code.
1262
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001263- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001264 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001265
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001266 @staticmethod
1267 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001268
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001269 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001270
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001271- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1272 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1273 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1274 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1275 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1276 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1277 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1278 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1279 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1280 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1281 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1282
1283 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1284 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1285 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1286 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1287 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1288 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1289 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1290
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001291- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1292 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1293
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001294- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001295 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001296
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001297- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001298 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001299 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1300
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001301- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001302 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1303 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1304
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001305- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1306 types that support garbage collection.
1307
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001308- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1309
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001310- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1311 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1312 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1313 Jython.
1314
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001315- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1316
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001317- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1318 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1319
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001320- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1321 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1322 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001323
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001324- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1325 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1326 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1327
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001328Extension modules
1329-----------------
1330
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001331- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1332
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001333Library
1334-------
1335
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001336- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1337 TIS-620
1338
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001339- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1340 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1341 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1342 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1343 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1344 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1345 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1346 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1347 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1348 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1349
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001350- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1351
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001352- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1353 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1354 same as when the argument is omitted).
1355 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1356
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001357- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1358
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001359- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1360 schemes are offered.
1361
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001362- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1363
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001364- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1365 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1366 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1367
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001368- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1369
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001370- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1371 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1372
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001373- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1374 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1375 when dummy_threading is being used.
1376
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001377- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1378 from a tarfile.
1379
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001380- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001381 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001382
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001383- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1384 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1385 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1386 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1387
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001388- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1389 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1390
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001391- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1392 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1393 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1394 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1395 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1396 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1397 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1398 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1399 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1400 by some other method in progress).
1401
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001402- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1403 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1404 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001405
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001406- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1407
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001408- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1409 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1410 AM Kuchling.
1411
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001412- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1413 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1414 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1415
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001416- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1417 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1418 instead of unsigned.
1419
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001420- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001421 no longer part of the public API.
1422
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001423- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1424 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1425 string methods of the same name).
1426
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001427- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001428 SF patch 945642.
1429
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001430- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1431
1432 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1433
1434 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1435 DocTestSuites.
1436
1437- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1438 that provide thread-local data.
1439
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001440- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1441 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1442
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001443- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1444
1445- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1446 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1447 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1448
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001449- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1450
1451 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1452 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1453 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001454
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001455 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1456 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1457 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1458 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1459
1460 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1461 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1462
1463 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1464 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1465 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1466 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1467
1468 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1469 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1470 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1471 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1472 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1473
1474 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1475 wrapping help output.
1476
1477 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1478 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1479 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001480
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001481C API
1482-----
1483
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001484- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1485 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1486 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1487 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1488 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1489 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1490 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1491 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1492 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1493 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1494 its visible semantics have not changed.
1495
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001496- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1497 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1498
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001499Documentation
1500-------------
1501
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001502- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001503
1504 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001505 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001506
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001507 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001508
1509 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1510
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001511- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001512
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001513Tests
1514-----
1515
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001516- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001517 platforms that use the Makefile.
1518
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001519- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1520 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1521 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1522
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001523
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001524What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1525=================================
1526
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001527*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001528
1529Core and builtins
1530-----------------
1531
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001532- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1533 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1534 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1535 objects now (one object instead of three).
1536
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001537- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1538 Windows DLLs.
1539
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001540- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1541 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001542
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001543- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1544 a new .pyc magic.
1545
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001546- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1547 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1548 be there.
1549
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001550- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1551 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1552 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1553
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001554- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1555 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1556 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1557
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001558- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1559
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001560- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1561 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1562 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001563
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001564- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1565 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1566
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001567- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1568
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001569- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001570 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001571
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001572- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1573
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001574- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1575
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001576- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1577 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1578
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001579- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1580 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1581 Fixes bug #858016 .
1582
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001583- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1584 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1585 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1586
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001587- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1588 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1589 improves their performance (about 35%).
1590
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001591- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1592 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1593 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1594
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001595- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1596 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1597 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1598 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1599
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001600- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1601 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001602 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001603 length is not known).
1604
1605- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1606 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001607 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1608 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001609 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1610
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001611- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1612 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1613
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001614- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1615 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1616 keyword arguments.
1617
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001618- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1619 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1620 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1621
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001622- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1623 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1624 cases.
1625
1626- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1627 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1628 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1629 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1630 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1631 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1632 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1633 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1634 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1635 a release build.
1636
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001637- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1638 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1639
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001640- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001641 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001642
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001643- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1644 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1645 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1646 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1647 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1648 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1649 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1650 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1651 destroyed.
1652
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001653- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1654 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1655 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1656 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1657 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1658 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1659 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1660 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1661
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001662- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1663 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1664 character other than a space.
1665
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001666- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1667 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1668 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1669 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1670 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1671 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1672 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1673 attributes with the same name.
1674
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001675- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1676 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1677 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1678 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1679 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1680 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1681 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1682 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1683 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1684 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1685 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1686 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1687 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1688 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001689
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001690- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1691 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1692 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1693 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1694 This has been repaired.
1695
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001696- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1697
1698- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1699
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001700- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1701 over a sequence.
1702
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001703- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001704 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001705
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001706- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1707
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001708- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1709 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1710 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1711 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1712 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1713 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1714 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1715 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1716
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001717- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1718 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1719 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1720
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001721- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1722 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1723 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1724 freelist.
1725
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001726- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1727 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1728
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001729- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1730 number.
1731
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001732- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1733 a TypeError exception.
1734
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001735- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1736 820195.
1737
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001738- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1739 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1740 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1741
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001742- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001743 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1744 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001745
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001746- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1747 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1748 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1749
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001750- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1751 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001752 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001753
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001754- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001755 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1756 the first call.
1757
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001758
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001759Extension modules
1760-----------------
1761
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001762- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1763 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1764
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001765- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1766 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1767 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1768 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1769 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1770 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1771 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001772
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001773- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1774
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001775- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1776
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001777- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1778 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1779
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001780- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1781 fewer false positives.
1782
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001783- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1784 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1785
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001786- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001787 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1788
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001789- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001790 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001791 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001792 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1793 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001794
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001795- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1796 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1797 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1798 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1799
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001800- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1801 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1802 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1803 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1804 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1805 #897625.
1806
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001807- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1808 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1809
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001810- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1811 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1812 and pops on either side of the deque.
1813
1814- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1815 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1816
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001817- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1818 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1819 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1820 other functions that expect a function argument.
1821
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001822- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1823
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001824- os.getsid was added.
1825
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001826- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1827 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1828 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1829
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001830- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1831
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001832- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1833
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001834- readline.clear_history was added.
1835
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001836- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1837
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001838- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1839
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001840- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1841
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001842- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1843
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001844- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1845
1846- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1847
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001848- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1849
1850- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1851
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001852- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1853 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1854 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1855
1856- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1857 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1858 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1859 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1860 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1861 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1862 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1863
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001864- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1865 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1866 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1867 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001868
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001869- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001870 iterators from a single iterable.
1871
1872- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1873 of raising a TypeError exception.
1874
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001875- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1876 as parameter.
1877
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001878Library
1879-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001880
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001881- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1882
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001883- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1884 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1885 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001886
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001887- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1888 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1889 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001890
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001891- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001892
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001893- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1894 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001895
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001896- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1897 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1898
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001899- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1900
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001901- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001902 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001903
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001904- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001905 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001906
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001907- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1908
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001909- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1910 on cygwin and mingw32.
1911
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001912- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1913
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001914- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1915 module.
1916
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001917- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1918 installation scheme for all platforms.
1919
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001920- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001921 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001922
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001923- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1924 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1925 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1926
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001927- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1928 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1929 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1930
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001931- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1932
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001933- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1934
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001935- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1936 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1937
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001938- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1939 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1940 type pattern with the same value exists.
1941
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001942- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1943 when run from the command prompt).
1944
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001945- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1946 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1947
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001948- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1949 default sort).
1950
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001951- Added global runctx function to profile module
1952
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001953- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1954
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001955- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1956
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001957- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1958
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001959- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001960 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1961 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1962 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1963 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1964 accordingly.
1965
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001966- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1967 decoding standards.
1968
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001969- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1970 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1971 called for all requests.
1972
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001973- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1974 they are passed to the compiler.
1975
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001976- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1977 indent, width and depth.
1978
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001979- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1980 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1981
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001982- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1983 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1984
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001985- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1986
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001987- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1988
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001989- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1990
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001991- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1992 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1993
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001994- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001995 for better performance.
1996
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001997- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001998
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001999- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2000 a string).
2001
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002002- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2003
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002004- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2005
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002006- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2007
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002008- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2009
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002010- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2011 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2012 list of fieldnames.
2013
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002014- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2015 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2016
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002017- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2018
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002019- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2020 empty lists.
2021
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002022- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2023 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2024 and shelves.
2025
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002026- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2027 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2028
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002029- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002030 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2031 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002032
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002033- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2034 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002035 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002036
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002037- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002038 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2039 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2040
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002041- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2042 and removed in Py2.4.
2043
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002044- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2045
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002046- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2047
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002048Tools/Demos
2049-----------
2050
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002051- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2052 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2053
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002054- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2055
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002056- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2057 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2058 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2059 destination in situations where both files are given.
2060
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002061- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2062 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2063 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2064 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2065
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002066- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2067
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002068- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2069 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2070 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2071 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2072 now.
2073
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002074- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2075 in effect
2076
2077- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2078 C-c C-h
2079
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002080- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2081 -d option was given.
2082
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002083Build
2084-----
2085
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002086- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2087 build under OS X.
2088
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002089- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2090 --enable-profiling.
2091
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002092- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2093 is configured --with-tsc.
2094
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002095- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2096 on AMD64.
2097
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002098- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2099 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2100
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002101- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2102 removed.
2103
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002104- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2105 supported (see PEP 11).
2106
2107- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2108
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002109- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2110
2111- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2112 (see PEP 11).
2113
2114- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2115 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2116
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002117C API
2118-----
2119
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002120- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2121 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2122 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2123
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002124- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2125 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2126 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2127 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2128
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002129- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2130 generator objects.
2131
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002132- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2133 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002134 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2135 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002136
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002137- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2138 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2139
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002140- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2141 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2142 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2143 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2144 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2145
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002146- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2147 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2148 about 10% faster.
2149
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002150- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2151 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2152
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002153- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2154 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2155 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2156 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002158Windows
2159-------
2160
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002161- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2162 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2163 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2164 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2165
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002166- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2167 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2168 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2169
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002170
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002171What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2172===============================
2173
2174*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2175
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002176IDLE
2177----
2178
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002179- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2180 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2181 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2182 context-menu actions.
2183
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002184- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2185 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2186 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2187 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2188 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2189 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2190 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2191 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2192 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2193
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002194
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002195What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2196=============================================
2197
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002198*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002199
2200Core and builtins
2201-----------------
2202
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002203- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002204 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002205 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2206
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002207Extension modules
2208-----------------
2209
2210- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2211 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2212 than once. This has been fixed.
2213
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002214- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2215 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2216 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2217 call.
2218
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002219- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2220
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002221Library
2222-------
2223
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002224- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2225 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2226
2227- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2228 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2229 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2230 restored.
2231
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002232IDLE
2233----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002234
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002235- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002236
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002237Build
2238-----
2239
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002240- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2241 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2242
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002243C API
2244-----
2245
2246Windows
2247-------
2248
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002249- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2250 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2251
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002252- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2253
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002254Mac
2255---
2256
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002257- Various fixes to pimp.
2258
2259- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2260
2261- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2262 more problems than it solves.
2263
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002264
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002265What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2266=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002267
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002268*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2269
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002270Core and builtins
2271-----------------
2272
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002273- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2274 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2275
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002276- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2277 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002278 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002279
2280- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2281 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2282 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002283 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002284
2285- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2286 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002287
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002288- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2289 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2290 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2291
2292- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002293 770247.
2294
2295- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002296
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002297Extension modules
2298-----------------
2299
2300- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2301 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2302
2303- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2304
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002305- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2306
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002307- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2308 contained within the _strptime module.
2309
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002310- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2311 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2312
2313- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002314 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2315
2316- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2317 the find_class attribute, if present.
2318
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002319- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002320
2321 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2322 (SF bug 763298).
2323
2324 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002325 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2326 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2327 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002328
2329 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2330
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002331Library
2332-------
2333
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002334- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2335
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002336- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2337 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2338 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2339 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2340 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2341 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2342 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2343 or Tester().
2344
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002345- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2346 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2347 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2348 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2349 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2350 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2351 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2352 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2353 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002354
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002355 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002356
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002357- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2358 weren't before was an oversight.
2359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002360- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2361 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2362
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002363- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2364 when there are no lines.
2365
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002366- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2367 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2368
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002369- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2370 to child processes.
2371
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002372- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2373
2374- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2375
2376- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2377 xmlrpclib.
2378
2379- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2380 responses.
2381
2382- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2383 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2384
2385- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2386 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2387 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2388
2389- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2390 used as patterns.
2391
2392- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2393 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2394 than Tk 8.3.
2395
2396- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2397
2398- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002399
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002400Tools/Demos
2401-----------
2402
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002403- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2404
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002405- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2406
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002407- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002408
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002409Build
2410-----
2411
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002412- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2413
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002414- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2415
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002416- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2417 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002418
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002419- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2420 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2421 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002422
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002423C API
2424-----
2425
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002426- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2427 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2428
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002429Windows
2430-------
2431
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002432- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2433 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2434 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2435 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2436 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2437 Python exception ::
2438
2439 thread.error: can't start new thread
2440
2441 is raised now.
2442
2443- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2444 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2445 instead of from DLL teardown.
2446
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002447Mac
2448---
2449
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002450- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002451 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002452 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2453 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2454 the executable in the bundle.
2455
2456- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002457
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002458- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2459
2460- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2461 on Panther.
2462
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002463What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2464================================
2465
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002466*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002467
2468Core and builtins
2469-----------------
2470
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002471- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2472 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2473 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2474 with the -i option.
2475
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002476- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2477 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2478
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002479- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2480 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2481
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002482- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2483 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2484 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2485 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2486 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2487 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2488 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2489 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2490 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2491 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2492 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2493 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2494 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002495
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002496- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2497 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2498 embedded in a lambda expression.
2499
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002500- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2501 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2502 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2503 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2504 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2505
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002506- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2507 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2508 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2509
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002510- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2511 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2512
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002513- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2514 It's writable again.
2515
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002516- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2517 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2518 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002519 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002520
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002521- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2522 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2523 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2524
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002525Extension modules
2526-----------------
2527
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002528- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2529 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2530
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002531- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2532 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2533 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2534 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2535
2536- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2537 collection.
2538
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002539- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2540 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2541 unique within a single program run.
2542
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002543- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2544 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2545
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002546- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2547 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2548
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002549- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2550 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002551
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002552- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2553
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002554- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2555 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2556
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002557- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2558 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2559 for many BSD-derived systems.
2560
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002561
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002562Library
2563-------
2564
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002565- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2566 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2567 primary ones:
2568
2569 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2570 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2571 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2572
2573 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2574 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2575 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2576 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2577 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2578 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2579
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002580- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2581 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2582 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2583 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2584 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2585 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2586 argument.
2587
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002588- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2589 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2590 in the archive.
2591
2592- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2593 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2594
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002595- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2596 569574).
2597
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002598- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2599 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2600 no more.
2601
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002602- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2603 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2604 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2605 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2606 code coverage.
2607
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002608- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2609 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2610 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002611 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2612 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002613
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002614- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2615 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2616 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002617 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002618
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002619- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2620
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002621- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2622 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2623 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2624 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2625
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002626- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2627 handling.
2628
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002629- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2630 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2631
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002632- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2633 in socket.py.
2634
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002635- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2636
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002637- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2638 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2639 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2640 opener with proxy support.
2641
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002642- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2643
2644- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2645
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002646Tools/Demos
2647-----------
2648
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002649- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2650
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002651- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2652
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002653- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2654 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002655
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002656- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2657 files.
2658
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002659Build
2660-----
2661
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002662- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002663 different root directory.
2664
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002665C API
2666-----
2667
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002668- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2669 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2670 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2671 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2672 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2673 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2674 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2675 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2676 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2677 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2678
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002679- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2680 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2681 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2682 from Python.
2683
2684
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002685New platforms
2686-------------
2687
2688None this time.
2689
2690Tests
2691-----
2692
2693- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2694 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2695
2696Windows
2697-------
2698
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002699- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2700
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002701- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2702 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2703 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2704 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2705 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2706 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2707 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2708 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2709 that's what it's for.
2710
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002711Mac
2712---
2713
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002714- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2715 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2716 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2717 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002718- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2719 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2720- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002721
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002722SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2723------------------------------------
2724
2725430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2726598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2727622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2728661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2729683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2730697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2731713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2732724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2733727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2734729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2735730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2736731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2737732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2738733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2739735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2740740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2741744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2742745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2743747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2744749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2745751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2746753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2747755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2748757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2749760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2750
2751
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002752What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2753================================
2754
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002755*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756
2757Core and builtins
2758-----------------
2759
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002760- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2761 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2762
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002763- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2764 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2765 and cannot be strings).
2766
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002767- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2768 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2769 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2770 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2771
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002772- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2773 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2774 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2775 Python itself.
2776
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002777- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2778 the referenced object, if it has one.
2779
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002780- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2781 the thread started at
2782 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2783
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002784- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2785 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2786 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2787 placed on a list index.
2788
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002789- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2790 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2791 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2792 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2793
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002794- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2795 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2796 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2797 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2798 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2799 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2800 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2801
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002802- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2803 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2804 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2805 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2806 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2807
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002808- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2809 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002810
2811- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2812 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2813 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2814 #693195.)
2815
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002816- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2817 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002818
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002819- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002820 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002821 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2822 interpreter executions, would fail.
2823
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002824- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002825 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002826 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002827
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002828Extension modules
2829-----------------
2830
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002831- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2832 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2833 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2834 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2835
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002836- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2837 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2838
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002839- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2840 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2841 and Greg Chapman.)
2842
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002843- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2844 recursively.
2845
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002846- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002847 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2848 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2849 leaks.
2850
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002851- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2852
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002853- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2854 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2855 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2856 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2857 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2858 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2859 #705836.
2860
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002861- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002862 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2863
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002864- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2865 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2866 See SF bug #692416.
2867
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002868- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2869 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2870
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002871- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2872 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2873 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002874
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002875- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002876 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2877 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2878
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002879- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2880 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2881 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2882 timeouts to work properly.
2883
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002884Library
2885-------
2886
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002887- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2888 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2889 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2890 future release.
2891
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002892- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2893 for querying platform dependent features.
2894
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002895- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002896
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002897- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2898 pickle protocol versions.
2899
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002900- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2901 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2902 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2903
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002904- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2905
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002906- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2907 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2908 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2909 modules.
2910
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002911- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2912 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2913 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2914
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002915- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2916 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2917
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002918- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2919 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2920 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2921
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002922- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002923 MS Office extensions.
2924
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002925- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2926 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2927
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002928- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2929 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2930
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002931- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2932 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2933 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2934 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2935 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2936 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2937
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002938- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2939 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2940 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002941
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002942- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2943 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2944 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2945
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002946- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2947
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002948- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2949 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2950 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2951
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002952Tools/Demos
2953-----------
2954
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002955- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2956 See the module docstring for details.
2957
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002958Build
2959-----
2960
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002961- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2962 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002963
2964C API
2965-----
2966
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002967- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2968
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002969- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2970 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2971 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2972
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002973- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2974 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002975
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002976 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2977 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2978 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002979
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002980- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002981 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2982
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002983- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2984 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2985 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002986
2987New platforms
2988-------------
2989
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002990None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002991
2992Tests
2993-----
2994
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002995- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2996 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002997
2998Windows
2999-------
3000
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003001- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3002 function.
3003
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003004- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3005 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003006
3007Mac
3008---
3009
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003010- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3011 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003012
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003013- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3014 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003015
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003016- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3017 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3018 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003019
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003020- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003021 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3022 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003023
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003024- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3025 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003026
3027
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003028What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3029=================================
3030
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003031*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003032
3033Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003034-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003035
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003036- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3037 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3038 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3039
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003040- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3041 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3042 (SF patch #664376.)
3043
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003044- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3045 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3046 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3047 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3048 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3049 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003050 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003051
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003052- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3053 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3054 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3055 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003056 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003057
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003058- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3059 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3060 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3061 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3062 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3063 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3064 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3065 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3066 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3067 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3068 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3069
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003070- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3071 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3072 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3073 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3074 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3075 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3076
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003077- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3078 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3079
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003080- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3081 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3082 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3083 case.)
3084
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003085- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3086 passed as unicode strings.
3087
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003088- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3089 See SF bug #683467.
3090
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003091- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3092 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3093
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003094- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3095
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003096- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3097
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003098- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3099 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3100 arguments.
3101
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003102- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3103 See SF bug #667147.
3104
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003105- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003106 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003107 See SF bug #676155.
3108
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003109- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003110 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003111 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3112 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3113 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3114 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3115 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3116 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003117
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003118Extension modules
3119-----------------
3120
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003121- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3122 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3123 tp_as_number pointer.
3124
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003125- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3126 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3127 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3128 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3129 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3130
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003131- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3132
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003133- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3134
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003135- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003136 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003137 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3138 patch #678531.)
3139
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003140- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3141 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3142
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003143- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3144 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3145
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003146- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3147
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003148- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3149 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3150 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3151
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003152- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3153
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003154- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3155 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3156
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003157- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003158
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003159- datetime changes:
3160
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003161 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3162
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003163 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3164 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3165 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3166 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3167 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3168 now.
3169
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003170 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003171 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3172 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003173
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003174 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003175 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003176 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3177 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3178 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3179 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003180
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003181 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3182 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3183 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003184 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3185
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003186 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3187 by a later example coded by Guido.
3188
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003189 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003190 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3191 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3192 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003193 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3194 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3195
3196 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3197 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3198 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3199 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3200 tzinfo subclass instance.
3201
3202 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3203 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3204 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3205 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3206 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3207 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3208 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3209 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003210
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003211 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3212 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3213 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3214 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3215 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003216 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3217
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003218 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003219
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003220 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3221 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3222 as a naive datetime object.
3223
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003224 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3225 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3226 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3227
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003228 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3229 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3230 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3231 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3232 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3233 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3234 comparison.
3235
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003236 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3237 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3238 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3239 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003240 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003241
3242 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003243
3244 and ::
3245
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003246 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3247
3248 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3249 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3250 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3251 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3252
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003253 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3254 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3255 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3256 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3257 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3258
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003259 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3260 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003261 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3262 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003263
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003264Library
3265-------
3266
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003267- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3268 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3269
3270- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3271 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3272 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3273 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3274 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3275 See PEP 307 for details.
3276
3277- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3278 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3279
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003280- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3281 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003282 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003283 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3284 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003285 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003286
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003287- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3288 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3289
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003290- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3291 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3292 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3293
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003294- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3295
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003296- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3297 exception.
3298
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003299- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3300 class.
3301
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003302- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3303 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3304 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3305
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003306- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3307 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3308
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003309- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003310 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3311 See SF bug #659228.
3312
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003313- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3314 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3315 See SF patch #651082.
3316
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003317- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003318
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003319- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3320 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3321
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003322- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003323 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003324
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003325- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3326 DOS paths from other platforms.
3327
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003328Tools/Demos
3329-----------
3330
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003331- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3332 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3333 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3334 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3335 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3336 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3337 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3338 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3339 example:
3340
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003341 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3342 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003343
3344 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3345
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003346
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003347Build
3348-----
3349
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003350- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3351 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3352 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003353 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3354
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003355 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3356
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003357- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3358 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3359 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3360 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3361 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3362 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3363 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3364 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3365 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3366
3367- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3368 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3369 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3370 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3371
3372- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3373 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3374
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003375C API
3376-----
3377
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003378- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3379 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003380
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003381- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3382 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3383 tp_as_number pointer.
3384
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003385- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3386 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3387 (SF #681367)
3388
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003389- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3390 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3391 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3392 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003393
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003394Tests
3395-----
3396
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003397- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003398 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3399 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3400 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3401 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3402 pydoc.)
3403
3404- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3405
3406- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003407
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003408Windows
3409-------
3410
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003411- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3412 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3413 time).
3414
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003415- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3416 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3417
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003418- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3419 release without strong cryptography.
3420
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003421- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003422 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003423
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003424- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3425 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3426
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003427Mac
3428---
3429
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003430- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3431 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003432
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003433- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3434 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3435 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003436
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003437- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3438 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003439
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003440- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3441 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3442 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3443 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003444
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003445- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003446 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3447 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3448 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003449
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003450
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003451What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003452=================================
3453
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003454*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003456Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003458
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003459- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3460
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003461- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3462 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003463 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003464 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003465 a different meaning than before.
3466
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003467- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003468 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003469 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003470
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003471- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003472 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003473 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003474
3475- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3476 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3477 and deallocation.
3478
3479- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3480 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3481
3482- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3483 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3484 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3485 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3486 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3487
3488- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3489 now detected by the garbage collector.
3490
3491- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3492 [SF bug 519621]
3493
3494- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3495 identifier.
3496
3497- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3498 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3499 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3500 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3501 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3502 [SF bug 563060]
3503
3504- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3505 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3506 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3507 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3508 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3509
3510- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3511 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3512 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3513
3514- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3515
3516- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3517 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3518 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3519 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3520 state of the slots would be lost.)
3521
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003522Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003524
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003525- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003526 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3527 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3528 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3529 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003530 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3531 Jython 2.1.
3532
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003533- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003534 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003535 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3536 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3537 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3538 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3539 these, see PEP 302.
3540
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003541- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3542 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3543 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3544
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003545- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3546 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3547 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3548
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003549- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3550 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3551 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3552
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003553- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3554 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3555 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3556 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3557 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3558 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3559 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3560 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3561 releases or implementations.
3562
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003563- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003564 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3565 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003566
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003567- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3568 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3569
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003570- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3571 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3572 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3573
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003574- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3575 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3576
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003577- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3578 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003579 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3580 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003581
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003582- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3583 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3584 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3585 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3586 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3587
3588 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3589 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3590 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3591 pattern.
3592
3593 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3594 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3595 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3596 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3597
3598 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3599 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3600 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3601 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3602 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3603 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3604
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003605- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3606 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3607 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3608 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3609 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3610 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3611 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3612 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003613
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003614- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3615 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3616 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3617 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3618 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003619 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3620 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3621 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3622 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3623 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3624 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3625 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003626
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003627- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3628 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3629
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003630- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3631 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3632 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3633 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3634 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3635 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3636 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3637 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3638 to Zack Weinberg!
3639
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003640- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3641 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3642 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3643 type. This has been fixed now.
3644
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003645- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3646 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3647 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3648
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003649- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3650 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3651 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3652 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3653 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3654 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3655 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3656 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003657 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003658
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003659- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3660 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3661 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003662
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003663- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3664 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3665 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3666 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3667 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3668 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3669 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3670 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003671 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003672 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3673 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3674
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003675- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3676 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3677 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3678 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3679 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3680 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3681 this.)
3682
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003683- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3684 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003685 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003686 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003687 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3688 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003689 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3690 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003691
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003692- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3693 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3694 currently running.
3695
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003696- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3697 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3698 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3699 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3700
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003701- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3702 as directory names.
3703
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003704- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3705 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3706
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003707- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3708 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3709
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003710- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003711 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3712 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003713
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003714- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3715 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3716 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3717 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3718 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3719
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003720- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3721 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3722 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3723 removed.
3724
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003725- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3726 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3727 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3728
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003729- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3730 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3731 to __debug__.
3732
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003733- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3734 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3735 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3736
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003737- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3738 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3739 deprecated now.
3740
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003741- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3742 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3743 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003744
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003745- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3746 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3747 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3748 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3749 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003750
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003751- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3752 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3753
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003754- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3755 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3756 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003757 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003758 is backward compatible.
3759
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003760- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3761 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3762 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3763 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3764 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3765
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003766- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3767 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3768 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3769 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3770 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3771 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003772
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003773- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3774 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3775
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003776- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3777 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3778
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003779- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3780 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3781 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3782 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3783 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3784
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003785- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3786 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3787 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3788
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003789- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003790 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3791
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003792- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3793 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3794 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003795
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003796- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3797 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3798
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003799- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3800 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3801 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3802
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003803- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3804
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003805Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003807
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003808- Added three operators to the operator module:
3809 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3810 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3811 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3812
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003813- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3814
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003815- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3816 archives.
3817
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003818- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3819 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3820 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3821
3822 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3823
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003824- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3825 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3826 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003827 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003828
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003829- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3830 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3831 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3832 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003833 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3834 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3835 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3836 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003837
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003838- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3839 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003840
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003841- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3842
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003843- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3844 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3845
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003846- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3847 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3848 supported.
3849
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003850- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3851
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003852- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3853 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003854
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003855- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3856 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3857
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003858- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3859
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003860- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3861 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3862
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003863- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3864 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3865 functions but callable type objects.
3866
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003867- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003868 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003869 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003870
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003871- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3872 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003873
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003874- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3875 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003876
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003877- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3878 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3879 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3880 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3881
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003882- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3883 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003884
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003885- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3886 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3887 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3888 and __imul__.
3889
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003890- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003891 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3892 is called.
3893
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003894- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3895 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3896 interpreter was compiled.
3897
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003898- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3899 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3900 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003901 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003902 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3903 1, not 2.
3904
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003905- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3906 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3907 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3908 limit.
3909
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003910- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3911 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3912 bug #623464.
3913
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003914- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3915 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3916 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3917 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003919Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003921
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003922- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3923
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003924- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3925 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3926 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3927 with Python 2.3a2.
3928
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003929- os.path exposes getctime.
3930
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003931- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003932 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003933 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003934 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003935 unit tests of floating point results.
3936
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003937- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3938 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3939 has been increased.
3940
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003941- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3942 executed.
3943
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003944- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3945 postinstallation script.
3946
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003947- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3948 test the current module.
3949
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003950- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003951 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3952 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3953 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3954 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3955
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003956- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003957 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003958 Ward's Optik package.
3959
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003960- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3961 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3962 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3963 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3964
3965- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3966 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003967 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003968
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003969- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3970 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3971 shelf are binary pickles.
3972
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003973- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3974 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3975
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003976- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3977 modules are iterators now.
3978
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003979- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3980 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3981 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3982 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3983 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3984 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003985
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003986- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3987 with their entity value.
3988
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003989- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3990
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003991- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3992 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003993
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003994- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3995 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003996 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003997
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003998- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3999 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4000 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4001 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4002 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4003 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4004 main():
4005
4006 import locale
4007 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4008
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004009- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4010 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4011
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004012- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4013 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4014 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4015 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4016 to the new standard.
4017
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004018- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4019 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4020 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4021 an extension to the database.
4022
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004023- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4024 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4025 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4026 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004027 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004028
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004029- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004030 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004031
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004032- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4033 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4034 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4035 bounded integers.
4036
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004037- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4038 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4039 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4040 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4041 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4042 in existence.
4043
4044 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4045 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4046 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4047 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4048 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4049 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4050
4051 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4052 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4053 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4054 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4055
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004056- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4057 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4058 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4059
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004060- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4061
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004062- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4063 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4064 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4065 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4066
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004067- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4068 argument.
4069
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004070- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4071 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4072 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4073 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4074 [SF patch 560794].
4075
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004076- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4077 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4078 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004079 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4080 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4081 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004082
4083- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4084 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004085
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004086- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4087 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4088 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4089 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004090
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004091- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4092 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4093 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4094 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4095 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4096
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004097- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004098
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004099- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4100
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004101- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4102 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4103 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4104 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4105 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4106 identical to None.
4107
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004108- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4109 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4110 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4111 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4112 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4113 results now.
4114
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004115- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4116 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4117
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004118- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4119 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4120 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4121 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4122 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4123 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4124 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4125 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4126
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004127- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4128
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004129- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4130 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4131
4132- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4133 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4134 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4135 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4136 and other systems.
4137
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004138- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4139 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4140 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4141 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 +00004142 work well with these.
4143
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004144- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4145
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004146- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004147 connections.
4148
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004149- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4150 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4151 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4152
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004153- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4154 sets
4155
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004156- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4157 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4158 name.
4159
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004160- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4161 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4162 passed in.
4163
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004164- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004165 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004166 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4167 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004168
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004169- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4170
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004171- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4172
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004173- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4174 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4175 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4176
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004177- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4178 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4179 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4180 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004181 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004182
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004183- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004184 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004185 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004186
4187- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4188 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4189 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4190
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004191- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004192 the value of its expression argument.
4193
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004194- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4195 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4196 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4197
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004198- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4199 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4200 skipstone browser was included.
4201
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004202- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4203 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4204
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004205Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004207
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004208- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4209 names in addition to accepting file names.
4210
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004211- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4212 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4213 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4214 still used and useful.)
4215
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004216- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4217 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4218 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4219 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004220
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004221- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4222 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4223 the generated binary.
4224
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004225Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004227
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004228- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4229
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004230- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4231 except in the hands of experts.
4232
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004233- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004234 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4235 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4236 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004237
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004238- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4239 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4240 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4241 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4242 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4243 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4244 builds.
4245
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004246- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4247 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4248 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4249 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4250 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4251 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4252 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4253 new type.
4254
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004255- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004256
4257 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4258 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4259 positive infinities.
4260
4261 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4262 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4263 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4264 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4265 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4266 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4267 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4268
4269 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4270
4271 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4272
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004273- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4274 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4275 size of the executable.
4276
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004277- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4278 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4279 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4280 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004281
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004282- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4283
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004284- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4285 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4286 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004287
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004288- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4289 well as Unix.
4290
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004291- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4292 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4293 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4294 modules in the README file for details.
4295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004296C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004298
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004299- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4300 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004301 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004302 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004303 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004304
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004305- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4306 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4307 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4308 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4309 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4310 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004311 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004312 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4313 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4314 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4315 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4316 aligned.)
4317
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004318- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4319 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4320 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4321
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004322- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4323 level.
4324
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004325- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4326 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4327 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4328 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4329 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4330
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004331- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4332 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4333 code.
4334
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004335- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4336 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4337 adjusting for negative indices.
4338
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004339- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4340 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4341 object.
4342
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004343- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4344 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4345 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4346
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004347- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4348 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004349
4350- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4351
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004352- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4353 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4354 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4355 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4356
4357- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4358
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004359- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004360
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004361- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004362 without going through the buffer API.
4363
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004365
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004366- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4367 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4368 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4369 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4370
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004371- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4372 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4373
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004374- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004375 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4376
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004377New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004379
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004380- OpenVMS is now supported.
4381
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004382- AtheOS is now supported.
4383
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004384- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4385
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004386- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4387
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004388Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-----
4390
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004391- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4392 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4393 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004394
4395Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004397
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004398- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4399 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4400 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4401 bugs.
4402 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004403 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004404 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4405 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004406 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004407
4408- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004409 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004410
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004411- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4412 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4413
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004414- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4415 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004416 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004417 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4418
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004419- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4420 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4421 use files" uninstall option).
4422
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004423- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4424
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004425- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4426 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4427
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004428- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4429 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4430 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4431
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004432- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4433 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4434 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4435 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4436 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004437 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4438 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4439 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004440
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004441- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004442 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004443 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4444 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4445 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4446 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4447 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4448 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4449 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4450 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4451 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4452 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4453 work around.
4454
4455- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4456 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4457 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4458 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4459 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4460 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4461 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4462 specified with O_CREAT too).
4463
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004464Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465----
4466
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004467- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004468
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004469- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4470 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4471 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4472
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004473- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4474 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4475 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4476
4477- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4478 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4479 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4480 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4481 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4482 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4483 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4484 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004485
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004486- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4487 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4488 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004489
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004490- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4491 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4492 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4493 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4494 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004495
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004496- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4497 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4498 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004499
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004500- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4501 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004502
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004503- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4504 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4505 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4506 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4507 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004508
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004509- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4510 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4511 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4512
4513- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4514 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4515 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004516
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004517- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4518 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4519 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4520 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004521 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004522
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004523- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4524 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004525
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004526- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4527 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004528
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004529- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004530 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004531 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4532 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004533
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004534
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004535What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004536===============================
4537
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4539
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004540Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004542
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004543- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4544 with a custom metaclass.
4545
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004546Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004548
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004549- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4550 are proxies.
4551
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004552Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004554
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004555- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4556 very short strings.
4557
4558- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4559 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4560 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4561 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4562 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4563
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004564Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004566
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004567- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4568 close or delete time).
4569
4570- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4571 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4572
4573- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4574
4575- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004576 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004577
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004578Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004580
4581Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004583
4584C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004586
4587New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004589
4590Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592
4593Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004595
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004596- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4597
4598- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4599 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4600
4601- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4602 deleted at process exit time.
4603
4604- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4605 in backslash.
4606
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004607Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004609
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004610- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4611 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4612 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4613
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004614
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004615What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004616===========================
4617
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4619
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004620Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004622
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004623- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4624 been extensively updated. See
4625
4626 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4627
4628 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4629
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004630- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4631 deleted!
4632
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004633- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4634 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4635 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4636 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4637 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4638
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004639- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4640
4641 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4642 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4643
4644 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4645 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4646 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4647 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4648 supported anyway.
4649
4650 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4651 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4652
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004653- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4654 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4655 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4656 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4657 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004658
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004659- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4660 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4661 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4662
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004663Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004665
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004666- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4667 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4668 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4669 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4670 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4671 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004672 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4673 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4674 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4675 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004676
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004677- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4678 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4679 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4680
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004681Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004683
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004684- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4685
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004686Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004688
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004689- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4690 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4691 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4692 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4693 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4694 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4695
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004696- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4697
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004698- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4699
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004700- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4701
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004702- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4703 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4704 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4705
4706- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4707
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004708Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004710
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004711- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4712 off a search on Google.
4713
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004716
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004717- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4718 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4719 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4720 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4721 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4722 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4723 other platforms should do likewise.
4724
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004725- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4726 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4727 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4728
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004729C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004731
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004732- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4733 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4734 producing key-value pairs.
4735
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004736- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004737 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004738 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4739 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4740 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4741 previously went unchallenged.
4742
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004743New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004745
4746Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004748
4749Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751
4752Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004755- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4756 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004758- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4759 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4760 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4761 home.
4762
4763
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004764What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004765===========================
4766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4768
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004769Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004771
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004772- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4773 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004774
4775 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004776 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004777
4778 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4779 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004780 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004781 This needs to be documented.
4782
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004783- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4784 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4785
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004786- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4787 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4788 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4789
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004790- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4791 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4792
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004793- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4794 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4795 class forbids it).
4796
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004797- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4798 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4799 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4800
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004801- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4802
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004803Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004805
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004806- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4807 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004808 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004809
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004810- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4811 (like 1 + '').
4812
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004813Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004815
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004816- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4817 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4818 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4819 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004820 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004821 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4822
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004823- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4824 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4825 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4826 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4827
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004828- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4829 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004830 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4831 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4832 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004833
4834- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4835 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004836
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004837- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4838 bytes on its input.
4839
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004840Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004842
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004843- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004844 convenience function.
4845
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004846- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4847 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4848 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004849 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4850 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4851 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4852 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4853 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4854 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004855
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004856- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4857 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4858 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4859 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4860
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004861- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4862 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4863 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4864
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004865- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4866 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4867 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4868 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4869
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004870- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4871 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004873 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4874 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4875 new -l and -e options.
4876
4877- statcache is now deprecated.
4878
4879- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4880 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004882 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4883 time properly taken into account.
4884
4885- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4886 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4887 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4888 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4889
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004890Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004891-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004892
4893Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004895
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004896- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4897 is built with libdb3 if available.
4898
4899- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4900
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004901C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004903
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004904- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4905 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4906 PySequence_Size().
4907
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004908- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4909
4910- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4911 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4912 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4913
4914- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4915 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4916
4917- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4918 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4919
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004920New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004922
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004923- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4924 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4925
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004926- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4927 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4928
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004929- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4930
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004931Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004933
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004934- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4935 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4936
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004937Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004939
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004940Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004942
4943- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4944 removed completely in the next release.
4945
4946- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4947 OSX.
4948
4949- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4950 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4951
4952- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004954
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004955What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004956===========================
4957
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4959
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004960Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004962
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004963- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004964 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004965 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004966 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4967 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004968 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4969 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004970 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4971 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004972
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004973- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4974 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4975
4976- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4977 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4978
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004979Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004981
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004982- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4983 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4984 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4985 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4986 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4987 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4988 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4989 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4990
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004991- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4992 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4993 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4994 example).
4995
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004996- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004997 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004998 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004999 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005000
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005001- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5002 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5003 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005004 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005005
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005006- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5007 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5008 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5009 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5010 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5011 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5012
5013 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5014
5015 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5016
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005017Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005019
5020- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5021
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005022- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5023
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005024- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5025 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005026
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005027- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5028 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5029 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5030 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5031 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5032 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005033 attributes.
5034
5035- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5036 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5037 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005038
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005039- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5040 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5041 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005042
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005043- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5044 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5045 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005046 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5047 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5048
5049- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5050 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005051
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005053-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005054
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005055- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5056 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5057
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005058- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5059 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5060 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5061 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5062
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005063- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5064 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5065 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5066 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5067
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005068 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5069 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5070 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5071 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5072 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5073 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5074 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5075 without losing information).
5076
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005077- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005078 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5079 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5080 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5081 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5082 module).
5083
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005084 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005085 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5086 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5087 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5088 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005089
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005090- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005091 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5092 encoding.
5093
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005094- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5095 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005098 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5099
5100- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5101 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5102 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5103 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5104
5105- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5106
5107- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5108 ON, and OFF.
5109
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005110- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5111 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5112
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005113Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005114-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005115
5116- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5117 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5118 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005119
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005120- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5121 been added: -X and -E.
5122
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005123Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005125
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005126- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5127 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5128
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005129C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005131
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005132- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5133 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5134 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5135 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5136 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5137
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005138- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5139 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5140 as long) arguments.
5141
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005142- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5143 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5144 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5145 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5146 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5147 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5148
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005149- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5150 input.
5151
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005152New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005154
5155Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005157
5158Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005160
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005161- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5162 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5163 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5164
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005165- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5166 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5167 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005168 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005169
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5171 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5172 import signal
5173 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005174
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005176 while 1:
5177 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005179 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5180 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5181 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5182 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005183
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005184
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005185What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5186===========================
5187
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5189
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005190Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005192
5193- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5194 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5195 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5196
5197- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5198 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5199 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5200 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5201 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5202 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5203 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005204
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005205- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005206 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005207 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5208 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5209 associate a docstring with a property.
5210
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005211- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5212 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5213 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5214 other built-in object types.
5215
5216- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5217 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5218 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5219 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5220 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5221
5222- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5223 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5224
5225- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5226 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005227 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005228 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5229 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5230 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5231 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5232 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5233
5234- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5235 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5236 class.
5237
5238- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5239 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5240 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5241 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5242
5243- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5244 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5245 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5246 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5247
5248- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5249 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5250
5251- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5252 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5253 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5254 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5255 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005256 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005257 with the same value as s.
5258
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005259- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5260
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005261Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005263
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005264- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5265
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005266- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5267 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5268 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5269 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5270 objects.
5271
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005272- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5273 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005274 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5275 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5276
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005277- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5278 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5279 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5280
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005281Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005283
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005284- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5285 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5286 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5287 by the instances.
5288
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005289- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5290 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5291 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5292
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005293- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5294 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5295 before the entire comparison is complete.
5296
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005297- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5298 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5299 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5300
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005301- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5302 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5303 getwriter().
5304
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005305- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5306 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5307
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005308- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005309 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5310 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5311
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005312- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5313 iterable object.
5314
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005315- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5316 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005317
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005318- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5319 authentication.
5320
5321- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5322 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005323
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005324- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005325 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5326 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5327 a sample driver.)
5328
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005329Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005331
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005332- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5333 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5334 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5335 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5336 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5337 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5338 kernel has large file support.
5339
5340- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5341 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5342 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5343 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5344 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5345
5346- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5347 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5348 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5349
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005350C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005351-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005352
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005353- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5354 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5355
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005356New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005358
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005359- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5360 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5361
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005364
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005365- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5366 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5367 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5368 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5369 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5370
5371- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5372 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5373 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5374 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5375
5376- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5377 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5378
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005379Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005380-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005381
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005382- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005383 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5384 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005385
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005386
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005387What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5388===========================
5389
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5391
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005392Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005394
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005395- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5396 big to represent as a C double.
5397
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005398- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5399 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5400 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5401 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5402 restriction).
5403
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005404- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5405 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5406 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5407 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5408 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5409
5410 >>> dir([])
5411 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5412 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5413 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5414 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5415 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5416 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5417 'reverse', 'sort']
5418
5419 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5420
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005421- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005422 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5423 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5424 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5425 OverflowError exception.
5426
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005427- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005428 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005429 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5430 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5431 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5432 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5433 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005434 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5436 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5437
5438 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5439 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5440 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5441 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005443- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005444 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5445 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5446 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5447 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5448 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5449 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5450 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5451 once it is created.
5452
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005453- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5454 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5455 (key, value) pairs.
5456
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005457- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005458 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5459 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5460
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005461- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5462 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5463 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5464 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5465 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005466
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005467- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005468 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5469 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5470
5471 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005473- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005474 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5475
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005476Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005477-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005478
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005479- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005480 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5481 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005482
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005483- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5484 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5485 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5486 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5487 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5488 in this area anymore).
5489
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005490- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5491 threading.Timer.
5492
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005493- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5494 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5495
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005496- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005497 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5498
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005499- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005500 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5501 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5502 converted to Python longs.
5503
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005504- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005505 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5506
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005507- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5508 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5509 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5510
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005511Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005513
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005514- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5515 division operators as per PEP 238.
5516
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005517Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005519
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005520- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5521 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5522 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5523 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5524
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005526-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005527
5528- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005529
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005530- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5531 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005532 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005533
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005534 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5535 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005536 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005537 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005538
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005539- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005540 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5541 module:
5542
5543 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005544
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005545 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5546 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005547
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005548 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5549 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005550
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005551 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5552
5553 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5554
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005555- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005556 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5557 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5558 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005559
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005560New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005562
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005563- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5564 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5565 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5566 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5567 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005568
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005569Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005571
5572Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005573-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005574
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005575- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5576 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5577 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5578 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005579 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5580 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5581 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5582 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5583 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005584
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005585- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005586 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5587
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005588
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005589What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5590===========================
5591
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005592*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5593
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005594Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005595-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005596
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005597- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5598 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5599
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005600- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5601 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5602 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005603
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005604- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5605 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5606 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5607 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005608
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005609- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005611- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005612
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005613Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005615
5616- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005617 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005618 the module docstring for details.
5619
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005620Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005621-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005622
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005623- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005624 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5625 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5626 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005627
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005628- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5629 Nick Mathewson.
5630
5631Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005632----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005633
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005634- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5635 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5636 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5637 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5638 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5639 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5640 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5641 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5642
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005643- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5644 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5645 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5646 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5647
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005648- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5649 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5650 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5651 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5652 come a long way).
5653
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005654- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5655 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5656 write filters for these warnings).
5657
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005658- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5659 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5660 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5661 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5662 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5663
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005664- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5665 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5666 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5667 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5668 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5669 older distribution.
5670
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005671Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005672-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005673
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005674- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5675 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005676 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005677
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005678- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5679 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5680 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5681
5682- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5683
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005684- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5685
5686- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5687
5688- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5689
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005690- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005691
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005692- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5693
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005694New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005695-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005696
5697C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005698-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005699
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005700- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5701 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5702 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5703 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5704 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5705 against buffer overruns.
5706
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005707- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005708 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5709 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005710 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5711 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5712 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5713
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005714- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5715 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5716 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5717 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5718 deprecated.
5719
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005720Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005721-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005722
5723- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5724 relevant is found.
5725
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005726
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005727What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005728===========================
5729
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005730*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5731
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005732Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005733----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005734
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005735- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5736 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5737 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5738 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5739 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5740 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5741 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5742 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005743 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005744 repaired.
5745
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005746- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005747 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005748 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5749 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5750 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5751 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5752 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5753 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5754 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5755 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5756
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005757- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5758 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5759 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5760 leading BMO character).
5761
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005762- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5763 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5764 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5765
5766 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5767 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5768 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005769
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005770 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5771 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5772 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5773 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5774 for various simple to use conversions.
5775
5776 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5777 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5778
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005779 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5780 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5781 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5782 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5783 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5784 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5785 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5786 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5787 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5788 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5789 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5790 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5791 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5792 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5793 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005794
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005795- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5796 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5797 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005798 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005799 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005800
5801 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005802 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5803 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5804 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5805 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5806 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005807 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5808 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005809
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005810 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5811 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5812 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005813 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005814
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005815- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5816 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5817 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5818 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5819 floating arithmetic,
5820
5821 x = 9007199254740992.0
5822 print long(x)
5823
5824 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5825 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5826 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5827 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5828 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5829 functions are of good quality).
5830
5831 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5832 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5833 algorithms to break.
5834
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005835- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5836 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5837 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5838 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5839 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5840 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5841 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5842 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5843 order.
5844
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005845- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5846 operation along the most common code paths.
5847
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005848- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5849 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5850
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005851- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5852 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5853 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5854 {}.update(UserDict())
5855
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005856- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5857 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5858 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5859 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5860 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5861 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5862 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5863 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5864
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005865- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005866 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005867
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005868 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005869 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5870 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005871 join() method of strings
5872 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005873 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5874 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005875 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005876 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005877
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005878- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5879 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5880
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005881- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5882 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5883
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005884- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5885 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5886 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5887 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5888
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005889- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5890 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005891 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005892 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5893 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005894
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005895- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5896
5897
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005898Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005899-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005900
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005901- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005902 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005903 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5904 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5905
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005906- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5907 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5908
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005909- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5910 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5911 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5912 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5913
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005914- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5915 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5916 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5917
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005918- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5919
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005920- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5921
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005922- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5923 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5924 that are still imported into string.py).
5925
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005926- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5927
5928- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5929 Now it does.
5930
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005931- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5932
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005933- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5934 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5935 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5936 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5937 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005938 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5939 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005940
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005941- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5942 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5943 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5944 'help(object)'.
5945
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005946Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005947-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005948
5949- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005950 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005951 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5952 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5953
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005954- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005955 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5956 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005957
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005958C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005959-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005960
5961- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5962 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005963
5964----
5965
5966**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**