blob: 9703f695ca744d426c8526752ec672f77483b2ae [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
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000015- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
16 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
17 was empty.
18
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000019- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
20 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
21
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000022- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
23present).
24
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000025- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
26 codes.
27
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000028- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
29 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
30 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
31
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000032- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
33 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
34
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000035- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000036 (fixes bug #1119418).
37
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000038- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
39
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000040- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
41 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
42
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000043- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
44 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
45 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
46
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000047- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
48
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000049- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
50 reference counts in some error exit cases.
51
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000052- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
53 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
54 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
55 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
56 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
57 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
58 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
59 realloc.
60
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000061- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
62 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
63
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000064- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
65 like their int counterparts.
66
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000067- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
68 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
69 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
70 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
71 for a longer write-up of the problem).
72
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000073- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
74 serializing floats.
75
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000076- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
77 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
78 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
79
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000080- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
81 278.
82
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000083- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
84 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
85 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
86 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000087 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000088 PyNumber_*().
89 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
90
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000091- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
92 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
93 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
94 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
95
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000096- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
97 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
98 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
99 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
100 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
101
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000102- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
103 disabled caused a crash.
104
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000105- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
106 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000109 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
110
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000111- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
112
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000113- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000114 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
115 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
116 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000117
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000118- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
119
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000120- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
121 returning None.
122
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000123- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000124 ('\') with a specific error message.
125
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000126- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
127
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000128- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
129 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
130
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000131- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000132 an ferror() call.
133
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000134- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
135 list.sort().
136
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000137- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
138 (2+3) --> (5).
139
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000140- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
141
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000142- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
143 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000144
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000145- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
146 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
147 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
148
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000149- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
150 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
151 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
152
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000153Extension Modules
154-----------------
155
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000156- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
157
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000158- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
159 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
160
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000161- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
162 returns in cStringIO.c.
163
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000164- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
165 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
166
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000167- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
168
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000169- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
170
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000171- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
172 the file system encoding.
173
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000174- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
175 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000176
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000177- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
178
179- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000180 line without newlines.
181
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000182- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
183 on Windows.
184
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000185- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
186 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
187
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000188- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
189 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
190 for large or negative values.
191
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000192- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000193 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000194
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000195- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
196
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000197- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
198 if available on the platform.
199
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000200- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
201 available on the platform.
202
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000203- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
204 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
205
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000206- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
207
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000208- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
209 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
210 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
211
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000212- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
213
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000214- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
215 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
216
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000217- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000218 file size.
219
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000220- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
221
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000222- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
223 {remove_history,replace_history}
224
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000225- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
226 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000227
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000228- stat_float_times is now True.
229
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000230- array.array objects are now picklable.
231
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000232- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
233 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
234
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000235- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
236 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
237 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
238
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000239- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
240 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000241
242Library
243-------
244
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000245- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
246 to get the correct encoding.
247
248- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
249 languages.
250
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000251- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
252
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000253- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
254
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000255- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
256
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000257- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
258 functionality.
259
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000260- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
261
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000262- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
263 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
264
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000265- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
266 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
267 match the Content-Length header.
268
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000269- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
270
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000271- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
272 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
273 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
274
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000275- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
276
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000277- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
278
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000279- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
280 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
281
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000282- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
283 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
284 Tkdnd.
285
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000286- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
287 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
288
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000289- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
290 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
291
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000292- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000293 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
294
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000295- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
296 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
297
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000298- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
299 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
300
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000301- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000302 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000303
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000304- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
305
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000306- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
307 error messages.
308
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000309- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
310
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000311- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
312 Bug #1224621.
313
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000314- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
315 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
316 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
317 terminates by raising StopIteration.
318
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000319- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
320
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000321- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
322 component of the path.
323
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000324- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
325 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
326 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
327 class at all.
328
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000329- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
330 files to PyPI.
331
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000332- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
333 them to PyPI.
334
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000335- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
336 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
337 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
338 work as expected.
339
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000340- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
341 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
342
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000343- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000344 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
345
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000346- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
347
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000348- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
349 to build.
350
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000351- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
352 symbolic links on Windows.
353
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000354- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000355 profile.py if available.
356
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000357- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
358
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000359- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
360 in LWPCookieJar.
361
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000362- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
363
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000364- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
365
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000366- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
367
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000368- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
369
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000370- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
371
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000372- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
373
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000374- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
375
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000376- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
377
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000378- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
379 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
380 be exploited in various ways.
381
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000382- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
383
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000384- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
385
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000386- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
387
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000388- Enhancements to the csv module:
389
390 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000391 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000392 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000393 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
394 reporting.
395 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
396 dictates.
397 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000398 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000399 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000400 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
401 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000402 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
403 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000404 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000405 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
406 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
407 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
408 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
409 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
410 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
411 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
412 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
413 without first creating a dialect class.
414 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
415 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
416 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000417 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000418 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
419 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000420 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
421 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
422 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
423 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000424 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
425 This has been fixed.
426
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000427- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
428 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
429 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
430 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
431
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000432- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
433
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000434- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
435 (Bug #951915).
436
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000437- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
438 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
439 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000440 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000441
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000442- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
443
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000444- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
445 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
446
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000447- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
448
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000449- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
450
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000451- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
452
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000453- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
454
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000455- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
456
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000457- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
458 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
459 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
460
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000461- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000462 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000463
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000464- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
465 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
466 tokenizer with very long source lines.
467
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000468- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
469 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
470
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000471- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
472 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000473
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000474- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
475 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
476
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000477- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
478 correctly.
479
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000480- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
481 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
482 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
483 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
484 between two lines.
485
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000486- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
487 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
488 handlers.
489
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000490- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000491 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
492 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000493
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000494- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
495 considering it exactly like a '*'.
496
497
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000498Build
499-----
500
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000501- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
502 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
503
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000504- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
505 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
506
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000507- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
508 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
509 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000510 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000511
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000512- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
513 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
514 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
515
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000516- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
517
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000518- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
519 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
520
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000521- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
522 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
523 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
524 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
525 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
526 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
527 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
528 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
529
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000530- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
531 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
532 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
533 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
534
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000535
536C API
537-----
538
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000539- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
540
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000541- Removed PyRange_New().
542
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000543
544Tests
545-----
546
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000547- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000548
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000549
550Documentation
551-------------
552
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000553- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
554
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000555- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
556
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000557- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
558
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000559- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
560
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000561- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
562
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000563- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
564
565- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
566
567- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
568
569- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
570
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000571- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
572 Closes bug #1166582.
573
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000574- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
575 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
576 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
577
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000578Mac
579---
580
581
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000582New platforms
583-------------
584
585- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
586
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000587
588Tools/Demos
589-----------
590
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000591- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
592 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
593 source files that need an encoding declaration.
594 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
595
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000596- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
597
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000598- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000599
600
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000601What's New in Python 2.4 final?
602===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000603
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000604*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000605
606Core and builtins
607-----------------
608
609- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
610 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
611 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
612
613
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000614What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
615==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000616
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000617*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000618
619Core and builtins
620-----------------
621
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000622- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
623 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
624 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
625
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000626
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000627Library
628-------
629
630- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
631 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
632 raised is re-raised.
633
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000634- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
635 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
636
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000637- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
638 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
639 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
640 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
641 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
642 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
643 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
644 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
645 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
646 by the slice are recomputed now.
647
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000648- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000649
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000650Build
651-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000652
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000653- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
654 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
655 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000656
657C API
658-----
659
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000660- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
661
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000662
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000663What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
664================================
665
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000666*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000667
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000668License
669-------
670
671The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
672is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
673changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
674Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
675intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
676durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
677the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
678License::
679
680 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
681
682says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
683to Python 2.1.1.
684
685The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
686License Version 2.
687
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000688Core and builtins
689-----------------
690
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000691- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
692 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
693 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
694 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
695 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
696 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
697 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
698 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
699 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
700 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
701
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000702- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000703
704Extension Modules
705-----------------
706
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000707- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
708 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
709 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
710 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000711
712Library
713-------
714
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000715- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
716 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
717 returned.
718
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000719- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
720
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000721- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
722 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
723
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000724- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
725
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000726- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
727 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000728
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000729- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
730
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000731- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
732
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000733- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000734 the source code is updated and reloaded.
735
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000736Build
737-----
738
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000739- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000740
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000741What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
742================================
743
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000744*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000745
746Core and builtins
747-----------------
748
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000749- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000750 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
751
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000752- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
753 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
754 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
755 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
756
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000757- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
758 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
759
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000760- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
761 constant.
762
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000763- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
764 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
765 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
766 large), and to anomalies such as
767 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
768 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
769 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
770 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000771
772Extension modules
773-----------------
774
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000775- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
776 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000777 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
778 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
779 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000780
781Library
782-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000783
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000784- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000785 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000786 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
787 --swig-cpp.
788
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000789- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
790 it is set.
791
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000792- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000793
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000794- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
795 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
796 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
797 Closes bug #1039270.
798
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000799- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000800
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000801 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000802 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
803 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
804 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
805 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
806 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
807 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
808 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
809 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
810 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
811 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
812 + Updates to documentation.
813
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000814- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
815 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
816 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
817 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
818
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000819- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000820
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000821- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
822 applications should use the getmember function.
823
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000824- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
825
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000826- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
827 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
828 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
829 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
830 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
831 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
832 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
833 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
834 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
835
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000836- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
837 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000838 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000839
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000840- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
841 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
842 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
843 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
844 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
845 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
846 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
847 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000848
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000849- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
850 the new public features (of which there are many).
851
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000852- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000853 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
854 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
855 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
856 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000857 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000858
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000859- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
860
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000861- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
862 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
863 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
864 options.
865
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000866- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
867 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
868 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
869 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
870 conditions under which non-string values work.
871
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000872Build
873-----
874
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000875- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
876 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
877 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
878
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000879- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
880 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
881 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
882 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
883 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000884
885C API
886-----
887
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000888- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
889 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
890
891- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
892
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000893- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
894 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
895 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
896 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
897 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
898 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
899 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
900 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
901 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
902
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000903- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
904
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000905- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
906 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
907 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000908
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000909Tests
910-----
911
912- test__locale ported to unittest
913
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000914Mac
915---
916
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000917- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
918 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
919 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000920
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000921Tools/Demos
922-----------
923
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000924- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
925 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
926 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
927 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
928 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000929
930
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000931What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
932=================================
933
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000934*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000935
936Core and builtins
937-----------------
938
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000939- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000940 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
941
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000942- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
943 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
944 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
945 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
946 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
947 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
948 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
949 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000950 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
951 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
952 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
953 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
954 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000955
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000956- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
957 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
958 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
959 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
960 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
961
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000962- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
963
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000964- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
965 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
966
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000967- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
968 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
969 modified the list.
970
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000971- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
972 functions is now writable.
973
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000974- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
975 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
976 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
977 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
978
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000979- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
980 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
981 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
982 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
983 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000984
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000985- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
986 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
987
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000988Extension modules
989-----------------
990
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000991- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
992
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000993- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
994 data.
995
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000996- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
997 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
998 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
999 supposed to have been truncated away.
1000
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001001- Added socket.socketpair().
1002
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001003- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1004 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1005
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001006- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001007 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1008
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001009Library
1010-------
1011
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001012- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001013 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001014
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001015- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1016 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1017
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001018- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1019 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1020
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001021- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1022
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001023- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1024 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001025
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001026- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1027 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1028
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001029- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1030
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001031- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1032
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001033- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1034
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001035- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1036 Percivall.
1037
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001038- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1039 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1040
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001041- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1042 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1043 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001044 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001045
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001046- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1047 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1048 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1049 and exponent.
1050
1051- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1052
1053- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001054 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001055 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1056
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001057- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1058 to the readline module.
1059
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001060- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001061 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1062 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001063
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001064- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1065 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1066 contains symlinks.
1067
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001068- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1069 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1070
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001071- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1072 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1073 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1074
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001075- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1076 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1077 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1078 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1079 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1080 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1081 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1082 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1083 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1084 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1085 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1086 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1087 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1088
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001089- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1090
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001091Tools/Demos
1092-----------
1093
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001094- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1095 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1096
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001097- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1098
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001099Build
1100-----
1101
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001102- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1103 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1104 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1105 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1106 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1107 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1108 plans to do so.
1109
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001110- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1111 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1112
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001113- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1114 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1115
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001116- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1117 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1118
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001119- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1120 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1121
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001122- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1123 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1124
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001125C API
1126-----
1127
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001128..
1129
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001130Documentation
1131-------------
1132
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001133- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1134 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1135
1136- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1137 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1138 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001139
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001140New platforms
1141-------------
1142
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001143- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1144
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001145Tests
1146-----
1147
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001148..
1149
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001150Windows
1151-------
1152
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001153- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1154 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1155 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1156 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1157 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1158 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1159 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1160 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1161 the problem.
1162
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001163Mac
1164---
1165
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001166..
1167
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001168
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001169What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1170=================================
1171
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001172*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001173
1174Core and builtins
1175-----------------
1176
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001177- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1178 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1179 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1180 sensitive code.
1181
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001182- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001183 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001184
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001185 @staticmethod
1186 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001187
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001188 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001189
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001190- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1191 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1192 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1193 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1194 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1195 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1196 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1197 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1198 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1199 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1200 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1201
1202 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1203 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1204 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1205 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1206 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1207 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1208 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1209
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001210- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1211 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1212
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001213- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001214 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001215
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001216- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001217 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001218 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1219
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001220- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001221 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1222 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1223
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001224- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1225 types that support garbage collection.
1226
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001227- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1228
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001229- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1230 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1231 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1232 Jython.
1233
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001234- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1235
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001236- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1237 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1238
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001239- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1240 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1241 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001242
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001243- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1244 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1245 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1246
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001247Extension modules
1248-----------------
1249
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001250- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1251
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001252Library
1253-------
1254
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001255- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1256 TIS-620
1257
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001258- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1259 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1260 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1261 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1262 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1263 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1264 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1265 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1266 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1267 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1268
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001269- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1270
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001271- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1272 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1273 same as when the argument is omitted).
1274 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1275
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001276- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1277
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001278- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1279 schemes are offered.
1280
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001281- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1282
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001283- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1284 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1285 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1286
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001287- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1288
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001289- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1290 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1291
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001292- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1293 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1294 when dummy_threading is being used.
1295
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001296- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1297 from a tarfile.
1298
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001299- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001300 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001301
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001302- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1303 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1304 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1305 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1306
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001307- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1308 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1309
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001310- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1311 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1312 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1313 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1314 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1315 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1316 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1317 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1318 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1319 by some other method in progress).
1320
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001321- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1322 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1323 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001324
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001325- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1326
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001327- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1328 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1329 AM Kuchling.
1330
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001331- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1332 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1333 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1334
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001335- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1336 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1337 instead of unsigned.
1338
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001339- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001340 no longer part of the public API.
1341
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001342- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1343 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1344 string methods of the same name).
1345
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001346- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001347 SF patch 945642.
1348
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001349- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1350
1351 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1352
1353 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1354 DocTestSuites.
1355
1356- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1357 that provide thread-local data.
1358
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001359- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1360 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1361
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001362- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1363
1364- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1365 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1366 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1367
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001368- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1369
1370 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1371 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1372 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001373
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001374 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1375 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1376 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1377 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1378
1379 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1380 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1381
1382 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1383 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1384 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1385 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1386
1387 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1388 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1389 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1390 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1391 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1392
1393 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1394 wrapping help output.
1395
1396 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1397 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1398 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001399
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001400C API
1401-----
1402
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001403- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1404 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1405 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1406 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1407 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1408 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1409 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1410 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1411 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1412 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1413 its visible semantics have not changed.
1414
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001415- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1416 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1417
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001418Documentation
1419-------------
1420
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001421- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001422
1423 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001424 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001425
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001426 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001427
1428 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1429
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001430- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001431
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001432Tests
1433-----
1434
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001435- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001436 platforms that use the Makefile.
1437
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001438- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1439 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1440 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1441
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001442
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001443What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1444=================================
1445
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001446*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001447
1448Core and builtins
1449-----------------
1450
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001451- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1452 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1453 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1454 objects now (one object instead of three).
1455
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001456- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1457 Windows DLLs.
1458
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001459- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1460 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001461
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001462- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1463 a new .pyc magic.
1464
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001465- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1466 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1467 be there.
1468
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001469- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1470 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1471 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1472
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001473- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1474 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1475 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1476
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001477- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1478
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001479- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1480 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1481 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001482
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001483- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1484 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1485
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001486- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1487
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001488- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001489 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001490
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001491- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1492
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001493- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1494
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001495- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1496 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1497
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001498- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1499 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1500 Fixes bug #858016 .
1501
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001502- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1503 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1504 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1505
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001506- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1507 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1508 improves their performance (about 35%).
1509
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001510- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1511 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1512 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1513
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001514- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1515 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1516 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1517 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1518
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001519- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1520 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001521 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001522 length is not known).
1523
1524- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1525 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001526 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1527 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001528 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1529
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001530- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1531 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1532
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001533- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1534 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1535 keyword arguments.
1536
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001537- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1538 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1539 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1540
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001541- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1542 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1543 cases.
1544
1545- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1546 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1547 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1548 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1549 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1550 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1551 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1552 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1553 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1554 a release build.
1555
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001556- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1557 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1558
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001559- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001560 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001561
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001562- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1563 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1564 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1565 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1566 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1567 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1568 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1569 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1570 destroyed.
1571
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001572- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1573 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1574 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1575 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1576 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1577 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1578 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1579 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1580
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001581- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1582 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1583 character other than a space.
1584
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001585- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1586 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1587 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1588 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1589 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1590 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1591 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1592 attributes with the same name.
1593
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001594- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1595 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1596 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1597 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1598 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1599 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1600 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1601 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1602 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1603 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1604 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1605 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1606 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1607 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001608
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001609- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1610 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1611 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1612 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1613 This has been repaired.
1614
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001615- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1616
1617- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1618
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001619- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1620 over a sequence.
1621
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001622- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001623 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001624
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001625- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1626
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001627- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1628 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1629 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1630 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1631 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1632 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1633 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1634 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1635
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001636- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1637 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1638 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1639
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001640- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1641 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1642 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1643 freelist.
1644
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001645- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1646 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1647
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001648- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1649 number.
1650
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001651- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1652 a TypeError exception.
1653
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001654- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1655 820195.
1656
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001657- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1658 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1659 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1660
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001661- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001662 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1663 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001664
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001665- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1666 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1667 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1668
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001669- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1670 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001671 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001672
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001673- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001674 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1675 the first call.
1676
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001677
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001678Extension modules
1679-----------------
1680
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001681- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1682 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1683
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001684- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1685 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1686 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1687 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1688 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1689 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1690 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001691
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001692- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1693
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001694- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1695
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001696- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1697 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1698
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001699- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1700 fewer false positives.
1701
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001702- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1703 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1704
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001705- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001706 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1707
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001708- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001709 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001710 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001711 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1712 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001713
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001714- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1715 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1716 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1717 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1718
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001719- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1720 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1721 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1722 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1723 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1724 #897625.
1725
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001726- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1727 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1728
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001729- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1730 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1731 and pops on either side of the deque.
1732
1733- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1734 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1735
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001736- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1737 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1738 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1739 other functions that expect a function argument.
1740
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001741- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1742
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001743- os.getsid was added.
1744
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001745- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1746 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1747 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1748
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001749- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1750
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001751- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1752
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001753- readline.clear_history was added.
1754
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001755- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1756
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001757- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1758
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001759- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1760
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001761- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1762
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001763- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1764
1765- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1766
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001767- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1768
1769- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1770
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001771- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1772 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1773 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1774
1775- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1776 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1777 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1778 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1779 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1780 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1781 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1782
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001783- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1784 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1785 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1786 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001787
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001788- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001789 iterators from a single iterable.
1790
1791- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1792 of raising a TypeError exception.
1793
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001794- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1795 as parameter.
1796
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001797Library
1798-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001799
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001800- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1801
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001802- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1803 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1804 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001805
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001806- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1807 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1808 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001809
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001810- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001811
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001812- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1813 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001814
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001815- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1816 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1817
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001818- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1819
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001820- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001821 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001822
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001823- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001824 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001825
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001826- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1827
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001828- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1829 on cygwin and mingw32.
1830
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001831- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1832
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001833- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1834 module.
1835
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001836- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1837 installation scheme for all platforms.
1838
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001839- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001840 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001841
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001842- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1843 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1844 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1845
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001846- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1847 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1848 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1849
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001850- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1851
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001852- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1853
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001854- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1855 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1856
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001857- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1858 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1859 type pattern with the same value exists.
1860
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001861- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1862 when run from the command prompt).
1863
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001864- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1865 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1866
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001867- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1868 default sort).
1869
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001870- Added global runctx function to profile module
1871
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001872- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1873
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001874- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1875
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001876- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1877
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001878- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001879 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1880 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1881 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1882 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1883 accordingly.
1884
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001885- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1886 decoding standards.
1887
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001888- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1889 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1890 called for all requests.
1891
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001892- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1893 they are passed to the compiler.
1894
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001895- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1896 indent, width and depth.
1897
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001898- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1899 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1900
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001901- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1902 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1903
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001904- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1905
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001906- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1907
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001908- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1909
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001910- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1911 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1912
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001913- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001914 for better performance.
1915
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001916- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001917
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001918- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1919 a string).
1920
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001921- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1922
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001923- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1924
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001925- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1926
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001927- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1928
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001929- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1930 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1931 list of fieldnames.
1932
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001933- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1934 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1935
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001936- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1937
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001938- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1939 empty lists.
1940
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001941- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1942 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1943 and shelves.
1944
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001945- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1946 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1947
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001948- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001949 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1950 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001951
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001952- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1953 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001954 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001955
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001956- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001957 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1958 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1959
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001960- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1961 and removed in Py2.4.
1962
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001963- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1964
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001965- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1966
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001967Tools/Demos
1968-----------
1969
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001970- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1971 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1972
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001973- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1974
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001975- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1976 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1977 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1978 destination in situations where both files are given.
1979
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001980- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1981 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1982 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1983 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1984
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001985- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1986
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001987- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1988 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1989 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1990 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1991 now.
1992
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001993- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1994 in effect
1995
1996- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1997 C-c C-h
1998
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001999- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2000 -d option was given.
2001
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002002Build
2003-----
2004
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002005- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2006 build under OS X.
2007
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002008- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2009 --enable-profiling.
2010
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002011- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2012 is configured --with-tsc.
2013
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002014- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2015 on AMD64.
2016
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002017- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2018 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2019
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002020- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2021 removed.
2022
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002023- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2024 supported (see PEP 11).
2025
2026- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2027
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002028- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2029
2030- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2031 (see PEP 11).
2032
2033- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2034 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2035
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002036C API
2037-----
2038
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002039- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2040 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2041 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2042
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002043- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2044 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2045 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2046 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2047
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002048- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2049 generator objects.
2050
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002051- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2052 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002053 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2054 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002055
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002056- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2057 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2058
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002059- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2060 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2061 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2062 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2063 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2064
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002065- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2066 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2067 about 10% faster.
2068
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002069- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2070 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2071
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002072- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2073 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2074 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2075 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2076
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002077Windows
2078-------
2079
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002080- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2081 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2082 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2083 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2084
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002085- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2086 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2087 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2088
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002089
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002090What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2091===============================
2092
2093*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2094
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002095IDLE
2096----
2097
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002098- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2099 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2100 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2101 context-menu actions.
2102
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002103- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2104 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2105 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2106 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2107 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2108 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2109 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2110 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2111 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2112
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002113
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002114What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2115=============================================
2116
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002117*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002118
2119Core and builtins
2120-----------------
2121
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002122- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002123 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002124 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2125
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002126Extension modules
2127-----------------
2128
2129- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2130 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2131 than once. This has been fixed.
2132
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002133- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2134 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2135 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2136 call.
2137
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002138- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2139
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002140Library
2141-------
2142
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002143- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2144 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2145
2146- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2147 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2148 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2149 restored.
2150
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002151IDLE
2152----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002153
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002154- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002155
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002156Build
2157-----
2158
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002159- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2160 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2161
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002162C API
2163-----
2164
2165Windows
2166-------
2167
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002168- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2169 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2170
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002171- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2172
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002173Mac
2174---
2175
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002176- Various fixes to pimp.
2177
2178- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2179
2180- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2181 more problems than it solves.
2182
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002183
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002184What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2185=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002186
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002187*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2188
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002189Core and builtins
2190-----------------
2191
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002192- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2193 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2194
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002195- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2196 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002197 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002198
2199- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2200 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2201 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002202 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002203
2204- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2205 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002206
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002207- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2208 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2209 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2210
2211- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002212 770247.
2213
2214- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002215
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002216Extension modules
2217-----------------
2218
2219- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2220 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2221
2222- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2223
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002224- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2225
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002226- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2227 contained within the _strptime module.
2228
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002229- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2230 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2231
2232- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002233 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2234
2235- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2236 the find_class attribute, if present.
2237
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002238- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002239
2240 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2241 (SF bug 763298).
2242
2243 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002244 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2245 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2246 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002247
2248 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2249
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002250Library
2251-------
2252
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002253- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2254
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002255- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2256 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2257 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2258 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2259 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2260 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2261 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2262 or Tester().
2263
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002264- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2265 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2266 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2267 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2268 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2269 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2270 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2271 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2272 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002273
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002274 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002275
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002276- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2277 weren't before was an oversight.
2278
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002279- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2280 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2281
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002282- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2283 when there are no lines.
2284
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002285- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2286 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2287
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002288- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2289 to child processes.
2290
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002291- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2292
2293- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2294
2295- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2296 xmlrpclib.
2297
2298- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2299 responses.
2300
2301- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2302 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2303
2304- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2305 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2306 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2307
2308- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2309 used as patterns.
2310
2311- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2312 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2313 than Tk 8.3.
2314
2315- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2316
2317- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002318
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002319Tools/Demos
2320-----------
2321
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002322- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2323
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002324- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2325
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002326- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002327
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002328Build
2329-----
2330
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002331- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2332
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002333- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2334
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002335- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2336 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002337
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002338- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2339 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2340 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002341
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002342C API
2343-----
2344
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002345- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2346 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2347
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002348Windows
2349-------
2350
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002351- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2352 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2353 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2354 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2355 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2356 Python exception ::
2357
2358 thread.error: can't start new thread
2359
2360 is raised now.
2361
2362- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2363 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2364 instead of from DLL teardown.
2365
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002366Mac
2367---
2368
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002369- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002370 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002371 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2372 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2373 the executable in the bundle.
2374
2375- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002376
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002377- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2378
2379- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2380 on Panther.
2381
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002382What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2383================================
2384
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002385*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002386
2387Core and builtins
2388-----------------
2389
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002390- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2391 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2392 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2393 with the -i option.
2394
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002395- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2396 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2397
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002398- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2399 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2400
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002401- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2402 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2403 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2404 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2405 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2406 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2407 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2408 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2409 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2410 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2411 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2412 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2413 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002414
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002415- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2416 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2417 embedded in a lambda expression.
2418
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002419- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2420 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2421 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2422 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2423 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2424
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002425- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2426 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2427 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2428
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002429- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2430 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2431
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002432- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2433 It's writable again.
2434
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002435- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2436 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2437 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002438 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002439
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002440- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2441 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2442 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2443
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002444Extension modules
2445-----------------
2446
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002447- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2448 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2449
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002450- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2451 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2452 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2453 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2454
2455- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2456 collection.
2457
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002458- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2459 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2460 unique within a single program run.
2461
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002462- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2463 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2464
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002465- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2466 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2467
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002468- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2469 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002470
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002471- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2472
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002473- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2474 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2475
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002476- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2477 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2478 for many BSD-derived systems.
2479
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002480
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002481Library
2482-------
2483
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002484- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2485 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2486 primary ones:
2487
2488 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2489 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2490 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2491
2492 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2493 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2494 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2495 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2496 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2497 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2498
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002499- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2500 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2501 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2502 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2503 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2504 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2505 argument.
2506
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002507- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2508 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2509 in the archive.
2510
2511- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2512 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2513
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002514- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2515 569574).
2516
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002517- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2518 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2519 no more.
2520
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002521- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2522 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2523 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2524 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2525 code coverage.
2526
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002527- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2528 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2529 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002530 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2531 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002532
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002533- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2534 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2535 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002536 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002537
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002538- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2539
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002540- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2541 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2542 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2543 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2544
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002545- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2546 handling.
2547
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002548- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2549 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2550
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002551- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2552 in socket.py.
2553
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002554- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2555
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002556- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2557 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2558 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2559 opener with proxy support.
2560
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002561- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2562
2563- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2564
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002565Tools/Demos
2566-----------
2567
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002568- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2569
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002570- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2571
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002572- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2573 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002574
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002575- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2576 files.
2577
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002578Build
2579-----
2580
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002581- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002582 different root directory.
2583
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002584C API
2585-----
2586
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002587- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2588 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2589 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2590 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2591 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2592 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2593 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2594 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2595 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2596 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2597
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002598- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2599 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2600 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2601 from Python.
2602
2603
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002604New platforms
2605-------------
2606
2607None this time.
2608
2609Tests
2610-----
2611
2612- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2613 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2614
2615Windows
2616-------
2617
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002618- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2619
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002620- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2621 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2622 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2623 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2624 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2625 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2626 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2627 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2628 that's what it's for.
2629
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002630Mac
2631---
2632
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002633- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2634 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2635 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2636 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002637- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2638 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2639- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002640
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002641SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2642------------------------------------
2643
2644430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2645598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2646622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2647661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2648683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2649697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2650713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2651724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2652727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2653729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2654730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2655731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2656732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2657733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2658735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2659740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2660744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2661745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2662747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2663749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2664751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2665753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2666755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2667757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2668760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2669
2670
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002671What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2672================================
2673
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002674*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002675
2676Core and builtins
2677-----------------
2678
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002679- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2680 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2681
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002682- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2683 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2684 and cannot be strings).
2685
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002686- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2687 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2688 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2689 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2690
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002691- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2692 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2693 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2694 Python itself.
2695
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002696- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2697 the referenced object, if it has one.
2698
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002699- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2700 the thread started at
2701 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2702
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002703- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2704 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2705 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2706 placed on a list index.
2707
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002708- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2709 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2710 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2711 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2712
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002713- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2714 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2715 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2716 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2717 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2718 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2719 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2720
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002721- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2722 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2723 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2724 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2725 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2726
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002727- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2728 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002729
2730- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2731 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2732 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2733 #693195.)
2734
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002735- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2736 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002737
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002738- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002739 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002740 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2741 interpreter executions, would fail.
2742
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002743- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002744 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002745 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002746
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002747Extension modules
2748-----------------
2749
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002750- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2751 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2752 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2753 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2754
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002755- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2756 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2757
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002758- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2759 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2760 and Greg Chapman.)
2761
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002762- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2763 recursively.
2764
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002765- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002766 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2767 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2768 leaks.
2769
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002770- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2771
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002772- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2773 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2774 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2775 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2776 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2777 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2778 #705836.
2779
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002780- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002781 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2782
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002783- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2784 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2785 See SF bug #692416.
2786
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002787- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2788 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2789
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002790- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2791 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2792 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002793
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002794- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002795 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2796 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2797
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002798- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2799 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2800 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2801 timeouts to work properly.
2802
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002803Library
2804-------
2805
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002806- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2807 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2808 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2809 future release.
2810
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002811- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2812 for querying platform dependent features.
2813
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002814- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002815
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002816- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2817 pickle protocol versions.
2818
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002819- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2820 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2821 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2822
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002823- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2824
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002825- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2826 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2827 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2828 modules.
2829
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002830- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2831 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2832 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2833
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002834- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2835 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2836
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002837- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2838 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2839 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2840
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002841- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002842 MS Office extensions.
2843
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002844- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2845 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2846
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002847- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2848 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2849
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002850- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2851 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2852 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2853 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2854 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2855 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2856
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002857- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2858 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2859 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002860
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002861- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2862 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2863 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2864
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002865- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2866
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002867- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2868 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2869 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2870
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002871Tools/Demos
2872-----------
2873
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002874- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2875 See the module docstring for details.
2876
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002877Build
2878-----
2879
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002880- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2881 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002882
2883C API
2884-----
2885
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002886- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2887
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002888- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2889 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2890 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2891
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002892- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2893 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002894
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002895 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2896 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2897 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002898
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002899- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002900 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2901
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002902- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2903 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2904 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002905
2906New platforms
2907-------------
2908
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002909None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002910
2911Tests
2912-----
2913
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002914- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2915 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002916
2917Windows
2918-------
2919
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002920- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2921 function.
2922
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002923- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2924 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002925
2926Mac
2927---
2928
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002929- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2930 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002931
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002932- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2933 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002934
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002935- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2936 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2937 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002938
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002939- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002940 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2941 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002942
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002943- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2944 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002945
2946
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002947What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2948=================================
2949
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002950*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002951
2952Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002953-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002954
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002955- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2956 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2957 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2958
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002959- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2960 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2961 (SF patch #664376.)
2962
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002963- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2964 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2965 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2966 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2967 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2968 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002969 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002970
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002971- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2972 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2973 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2974 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002975 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002976
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002977- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2978 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2979 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2980 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2981 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2982 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2983 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2984 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2985 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2986 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2987 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2988
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002989- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2990 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2991 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2992 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2993 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2994 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2995
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002996- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2997 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2998
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002999- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3000 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3001 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3002 case.)
3003
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003004- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3005 passed as unicode strings.
3006
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003007- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3008 See SF bug #683467.
3009
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003010- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3011 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3012
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003013- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3014
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3016
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3018 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3019 arguments.
3020
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003021- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3022 See SF bug #667147.
3023
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003024- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003025 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003026 See SF bug #676155.
3027
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003028- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003029 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003030 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3031 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3032 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3033 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3034 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3035 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003036
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003037Extension modules
3038-----------------
3039
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003040- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3041 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3042 tp_as_number pointer.
3043
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003044- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3045 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3046 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3047 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3048 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3049
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003050- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3051
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003052- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3053
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003054- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003055 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003056 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3057 patch #678531.)
3058
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003059- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3060 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3061
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003062- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3063 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3064
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003065- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3066
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003067- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3068 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3069 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3070
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003071- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3072
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003073- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3074 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3075
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003076- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003077
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003078- datetime changes:
3079
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003080 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3081
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003082 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3083 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3084 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3085 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3086 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3087 now.
3088
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003089 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003090 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3091 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003092
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003093 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003094 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003095 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3096 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3097 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3098 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003099
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003100 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3101 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3102 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003103 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3104
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003105 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3106 by a later example coded by Guido.
3107
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003108 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003109 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3110 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3111 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003112 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3113 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3114
3115 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3116 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3117 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3118 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3119 tzinfo subclass instance.
3120
3121 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3122 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3123 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3124 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3125 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3126 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3127 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3128 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003129
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003130 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3131 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3132 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3133 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3134 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003135 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3136
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003137 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003138
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003139 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3140 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3141 as a naive datetime object.
3142
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003143 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3144 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3145 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3146
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003147 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3148 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3149 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3150 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3151 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3152 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3153 comparison.
3154
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003155 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3156 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3157 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3158 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003159 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003160
3161 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003162
3163 and ::
3164
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003165 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3166
3167 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3168 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3169 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3170 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3171
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003172 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3173 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3174 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3175 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3176 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3177
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003178 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3179 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003180 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3181 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003182
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003183Library
3184-------
3185
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003186- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3187 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3188
3189- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3190 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3191 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3192 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3193 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3194 See PEP 307 for details.
3195
3196- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3197 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3198
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003199- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3200 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003201 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003202 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3203 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003204 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003205
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003206- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3207 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3208
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003209- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3210 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3211 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3212
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003213- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3214
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003215- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3216 exception.
3217
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003218- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3219 class.
3220
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003221- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3222 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3223 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3224
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003225- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3226 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3227
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003228- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003229 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3230 See SF bug #659228.
3231
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003232- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3233 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3234 See SF patch #651082.
3235
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003236- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003237
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003238- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3239 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3240
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003241- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003242 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003243
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003244- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3245 DOS paths from other platforms.
3246
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003247Tools/Demos
3248-----------
3249
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003250- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3251 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3252 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3253 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3254 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3255 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3256 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3257 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3258 example:
3259
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003260 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3261 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003262
3263 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3264
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003266Build
3267-----
3268
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003269- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3270 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3271 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003272 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3273
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003274 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3275
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003276- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3277 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3278 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3279 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3280 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3281 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3282 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3283 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3284 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3285
3286- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3287 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3288 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3289 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3290
3291- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3292 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3293
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003294C API
3295-----
3296
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003297- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3298 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003299
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003300- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3301 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3302 tp_as_number pointer.
3303
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003304- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3305 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3306 (SF #681367)
3307
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003308- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3309 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3310 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3311 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003312
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003313Tests
3314-----
3315
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003316- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003317 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3318 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3319 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3320 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3321 pydoc.)
3322
3323- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3324
3325- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003326
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003327Windows
3328-------
3329
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003330- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3331 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3332 time).
3333
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003334- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3335 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3336
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003337- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3338 release without strong cryptography.
3339
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003340- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003341 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003342
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003343- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3344 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3345
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003346Mac
3347---
3348
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003349- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3350 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003351
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003352- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3353 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3354 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003355
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003356- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3357 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003358
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003359- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3360 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3361 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3362 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003363
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003364- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003365 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3366 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3367 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003368
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003369
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003370What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003371=================================
3372
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003373*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003375Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003377
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003378- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3379
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003380- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3381 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003382 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003383 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003384 a different meaning than before.
3385
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003386- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003387 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003388 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003389
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003390- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003391 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003392 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003393
3394- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3395 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3396 and deallocation.
3397
3398- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3399 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3400
3401- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3402 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3403 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3404 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3405 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3406
3407- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3408 now detected by the garbage collector.
3409
3410- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3411 [SF bug 519621]
3412
3413- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3414 identifier.
3415
3416- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3417 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3418 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3419 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3420 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3421 [SF bug 563060]
3422
3423- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3424 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3425 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3426 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3427 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3428
3429- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3430 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3431 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3432
3433- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3434
3435- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3436 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3437 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3438 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3439 state of the slots would be lost.)
3440
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003441Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003442-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003443
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003444- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003445 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3446 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3447 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3448 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003449 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3450 Jython 2.1.
3451
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003452- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003453 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003454 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3455 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3456 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3457 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3458 these, see PEP 302.
3459
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003460- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3461 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3462 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3463
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003464- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3465 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3466 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3467
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003468- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3469 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3470 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3471
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003472- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3473 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3474 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3475 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3476 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3477 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3478 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3479 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3480 releases or implementations.
3481
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003482- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003483 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3484 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003485
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003486- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3487 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3488
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003489- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3490 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3491 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3492
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003493- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3494 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3495
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003496- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3497 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003498 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3499 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003500
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003501- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3502 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3503 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3504 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3505 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3506
3507 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3508 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3509 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3510 pattern.
3511
3512 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3513 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3514 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3515 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3516
3517 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3518 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3519 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3520 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3521 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3522 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3523
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003524- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3525 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3526 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3527 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3528 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3529 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3530 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3531 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003532
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003533- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3534 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3535 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3536 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3537 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003538 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3539 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3540 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3541 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3542 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3543 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3544 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003545
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003546- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3547 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3548
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003549- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3550 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3551 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3552 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3553 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3554 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3555 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3556 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3557 to Zack Weinberg!
3558
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003559- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3560 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3561 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3562 type. This has been fixed now.
3563
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003564- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3565 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3566 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3567
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003568- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3569 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3570 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3571 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3572 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3573 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3574 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3575 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003576 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003577
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003578- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3579 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3580 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003581
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003582- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3583 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3584 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3585 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3586 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3587 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3588 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3589 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003590 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003591 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3592 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3593
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003594- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3595 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3596 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3597 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3598 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3599 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3600 this.)
3601
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003602- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3603 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003604 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003605 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003606 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3607 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003608 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3609 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003610
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003611- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3612 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3613 currently running.
3614
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003615- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3616 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3617 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3618 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3619
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003620- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3621 as directory names.
3622
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003623- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3624 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3625
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003626- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3627 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3628
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003629- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003630 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3631 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003632
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003633- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3634 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3635 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3636 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3637 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3638
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003639- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3640 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3641 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3642 removed.
3643
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003644- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3645 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3646 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3647
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003648- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3649 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3650 to __debug__.
3651
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003652- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3653 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3654 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3655
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003656- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3657 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3658 deprecated now.
3659
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003660- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3661 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3662 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003663
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003664- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3665 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3666 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3667 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3668 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003669
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003670- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3671 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3672
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003673- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3674 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3675 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003676 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003677 is backward compatible.
3678
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003679- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3680 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3681 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3682 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3683 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3684
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003685- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3686 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3687 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3688 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3689 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3690 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003691
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003692- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3693 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3694
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003695- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3696 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3697
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003698- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3699 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3700 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3701 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3702 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3703
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003704- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3705 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3706 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3707
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003708- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003709 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3710
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003711- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3712 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3713 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003714
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003715- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3716 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3717
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003718- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3719 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3720 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3721
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003722- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3723
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003724Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003726
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003727- Added three operators to the operator module:
3728 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3729 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3730 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3731
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003732- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3733
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003734- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3735 archives.
3736
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003737- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3738 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3739 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3740
3741 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3742
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003743- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3744 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3745 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003746 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003747
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003748- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3749 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3750 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3751 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003752 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3753 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3754 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3755 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003756
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003757- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3758 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003759
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003760- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3761
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003762- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3763 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3764
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003765- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3766 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3767 supported.
3768
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003769- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3770
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003771- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3772 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003773
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003774- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3775 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3776
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003777- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3778
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003779- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3780 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3781
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003782- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3783 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3784 functions but callable type objects.
3785
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003786- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003787 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003788 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003789
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003790- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3791 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003792
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003793- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3794 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003795
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003796- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3797 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3798 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3799 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3800
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003801- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3802 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003803
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003804- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3805 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3806 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3807 and __imul__.
3808
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003809- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003810 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3811 is called.
3812
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003813- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3814 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3815 interpreter was compiled.
3816
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003817- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3818 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3819 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003820 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003821 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3822 1, not 2.
3823
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003824- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3825 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3826 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3827 limit.
3828
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003829- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3830 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3831 bug #623464.
3832
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003833- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3834 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3835 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3836 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3837
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003838Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003840
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003841- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3842
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003843- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3844 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3845 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3846 with Python 2.3a2.
3847
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003848- os.path exposes getctime.
3849
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003850- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003851 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003852 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003853 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003854 unit tests of floating point results.
3855
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003856- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3857 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3858 has been increased.
3859
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003860- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3861 executed.
3862
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003863- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3864 postinstallation script.
3865
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003866- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3867 test the current module.
3868
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003869- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003870 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3871 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3872 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3873 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3874
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003875- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003876 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003877 Ward's Optik package.
3878
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003879- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3880 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3881 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3882 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3883
3884- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3885 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003886 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003887
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003888- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3889 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3890 shelf are binary pickles.
3891
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003892- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3893 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3894
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003895- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3896 modules are iterators now.
3897
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003898- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3899 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3900 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3901 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3902 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3903 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003904
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003905- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3906 with their entity value.
3907
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003908- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3909
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003910- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3911 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003912
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003913- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3914 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003915 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003916
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003917- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3918 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3919 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3920 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3921 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3922 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3923 main():
3924
3925 import locale
3926 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3927
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003928- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3929 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3930
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003931- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3932 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3933 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3934 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3935 to the new standard.
3936
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003937- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3938 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3939 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3940 an extension to the database.
3941
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003942- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3943 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3944 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3945 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003946 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003947
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003948- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003949 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003950
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003951- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3952 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3953 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3954 bounded integers.
3955
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003956- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3957 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3958 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3959 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3960 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3961 in existence.
3962
3963 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3964 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3965 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3966 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3967 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3968 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3969
3970 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3971 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3972 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3973 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3974
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003975- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3976 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3977 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3978
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003979- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3980
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003981- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3982 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3983 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3984 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3985
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003986- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3987 argument.
3988
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003989- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3990 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3991 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3992 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3993 [SF patch 560794].
3994
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003995- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3996 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3997 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003998 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3999 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4000 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004001
4002- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4003 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004004
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004005- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4006 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4007 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4008 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004009
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004010- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4011 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4012 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4013 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4014 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4015
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004016- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004017
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004018- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4019
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004020- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4021 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4022 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4023 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4024 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4025 identical to None.
4026
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004027- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4028 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4029 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4030 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4031 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4032 results now.
4033
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004034- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4035 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4036
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004037- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4038 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4039 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4040 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4041 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4042 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4043 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4044 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4045
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004046- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4047
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004048- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4049 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4050
4051- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4052 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4053 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4054 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4055 and other systems.
4056
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004057- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4058 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4059 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4060 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 +00004061 work well with these.
4062
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004063- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4064
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004065- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004066 connections.
4067
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004068- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4069 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4070 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4071
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004072- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4073 sets
4074
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004075- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4076 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4077 name.
4078
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004079- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4080 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4081 passed in.
4082
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004083- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004084 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004085 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4086 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004087
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004088- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4089
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004090- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4091
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004092- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4093 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4094 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4095
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004096- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4097 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4098 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4099 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004100 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004101
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004102- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004103 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004104 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004105
4106- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4107 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4108 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4109
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004110- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004111 the value of its expression argument.
4112
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004113- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4114 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4115 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4116
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004117- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4118 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4119 skipstone browser was included.
4120
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004121- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4122 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4123
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004124Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004126
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004127- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4128 names in addition to accepting file names.
4129
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004130- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4131 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4132 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4133 still used and useful.)
4134
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004135- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4136 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4137 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4138 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004139
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004140- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4141 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4142 the generated binary.
4143
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004144Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004146
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004147- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4148
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004149- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4150 except in the hands of experts.
4151
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004152- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004153 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4154 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4155 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004156
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004157- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4158 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4159 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4160 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4161 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4162 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4163 builds.
4164
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004165- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4166 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4167 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4168 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4169 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4170 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4171 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4172 new type.
4173
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004174- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004175
4176 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4177 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4178 positive infinities.
4179
4180 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4181 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4182 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4183 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4184 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4185 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4186 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4187
4188 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4189
4190 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4191
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004192- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4193 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4194 size of the executable.
4195
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004196- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4197 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4198 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4199 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004200
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004201- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4202
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004203- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4204 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4205 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004206
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004207- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4208 well as Unix.
4209
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004210- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4211 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4212 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4213 modules in the README file for details.
4214
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004215C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004217
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004218- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4219 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004220 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004221 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004222 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004223
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004224- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4225 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4226 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4227 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4228 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4229 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004230 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004231 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4232 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4233 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4234 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4235 aligned.)
4236
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004237- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4238 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4239 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4240
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004241- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4242 level.
4243
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004244- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4245 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4246 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4247 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4248 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4249
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004250- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4251 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4252 code.
4253
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004254- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4255 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4256 adjusting for negative indices.
4257
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004258- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4259 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4260 object.
4261
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004262- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4263 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4264 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4265
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004266- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4267 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004268
4269- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4270
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004271- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4272 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4273 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4274 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4275
4276- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4277
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004278- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004279
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004280- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004281 without going through the buffer API.
4282
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004284
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004285- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4286 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4287 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4288 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4289
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004290- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4291 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4292
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004293- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004294 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004296New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004298
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004299- OpenVMS is now supported.
4300
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004301- AtheOS is now supported.
4302
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004303- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4304
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004305- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4306
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004307Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-----
4309
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004310- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4311 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4312 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004313
4314Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004316
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004317- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4318 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4319 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4320 bugs.
4321 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004322 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004323 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4324 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004325 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004326
4327- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004328 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004329
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004330- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4331 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4332
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004333- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4334 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004335 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004336 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4337
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004338- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4339 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4340 use files" uninstall option).
4341
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004342- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4343
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004344- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4345 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4346
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004347- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4348 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4349 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4350
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004351- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4352 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4353 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4354 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4355 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004356 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4357 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4358 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004359
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004360- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004361 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004362 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4363 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4364 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4365 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4366 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4367 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4368 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4369 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4370 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4371 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4372 work around.
4373
4374- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4375 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4376 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4377 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4378 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4379 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4380 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4381 specified with O_CREAT too).
4382
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004383Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384----
4385
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004386- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004387
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004388- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4389 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4390 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4391
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004392- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4393 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4394 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4395
4396- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4397 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4398 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4399 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4400 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4401 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4402 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4403 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004404
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004405- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4406 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4407 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004408
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004409- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4410 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4411 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4412 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4413 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004414
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004415- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4416 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4417 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004418
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004419- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4420 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004421
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004422- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4423 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4424 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4425 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4426 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004427
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004428- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4429 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4430 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4431
4432- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4433 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4434 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004435
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004436- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4437 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4438 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4439 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004440 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004441
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004442- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4443 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004444
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004445- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4446 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004447
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004448- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004449 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004450 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4451 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004452
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004453
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004454What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004455===============================
4456
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4458
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004459Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004461
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004462- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4463 with a custom metaclass.
4464
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004465Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004467
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004468- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4469 are proxies.
4470
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004471Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004474- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4475 very short strings.
4476
4477- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4478 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4479 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4480 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4481 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4482
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004483Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004485
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004486- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4487 close or delete time).
4488
4489- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4490 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4491
4492- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4493
4494- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004495 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004496
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004497Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004499
4500Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004502
4503C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004505
4506New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004508
4509Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004511
4512Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004514
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004515- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4516
4517- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4518 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4519
4520- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4521 deleted at process exit time.
4522
4523- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4524 in backslash.
4525
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004526Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004528
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004529- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4530 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4531 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4532
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004533
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004534What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004535===========================
4536
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4538
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004539Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004541
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004542- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4543 been extensively updated. See
4544
4545 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4546
4547 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4548
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004549- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4550 deleted!
4551
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004552- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4553 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4554 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4555 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4556 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4557
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004558- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4559
4560 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4561 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4562
4563 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4564 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4565 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4566 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4567 supported anyway.
4568
4569 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4570 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4571
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004572- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4573 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4574 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4575 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4576 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004577
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004578- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4579 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4580 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4581
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004582Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004584
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004585- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4586 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4587 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4588 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4589 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4590 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004591 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4592 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4593 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4594 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004595
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004596- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4597 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4598 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4599
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004600Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004602
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004603- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4604
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004605Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004607
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004608- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4609 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4610 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4611 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4612 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4613 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4614
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004615- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4616
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004617- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4618
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004619- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4620
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004621- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4622 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4623 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4624
4625- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4626
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004627Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004629
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004630- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4631 off a search on Google.
4632
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004633Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004635
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004636- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4637 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4638 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4639 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4640 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4641 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4642 other platforms should do likewise.
4643
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004644- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4645 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4646 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4647
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004648C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004650
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004651- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4652 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4653 producing key-value pairs.
4654
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004655- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004656 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004657 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4658 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4659 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4660 previously went unchallenged.
4661
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004662New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004664
4665Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004667
4668Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004670
4671Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004673
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004674- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4675 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004677- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4678 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4679 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4680 home.
4681
4682
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004683What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004684===========================
4685
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4687
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004688Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004690
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004691- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4692 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004693
4694 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004695 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004696
4697 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4698 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004699 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004700 This needs to be documented.
4701
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004702- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4703 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4704
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004705- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4706 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4707 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4708
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004709- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4710 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4711
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004712- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4713 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4714 class forbids it).
4715
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004716- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4717 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4718 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4719
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004720- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4721
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004722Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004724
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004725- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4726 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004727 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004728
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004729- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4730 (like 1 + '').
4731
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004732Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004734
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004735- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4736 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4737 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4738 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004739 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004740 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4741
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004742- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4743 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4744 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4745 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4746
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004747- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4748 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004749 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4750 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4751 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004752
4753- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4754 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004755
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004756- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4757 bytes on its input.
4758
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004759Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004761
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004762- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004763 convenience function.
4764
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004765- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4766 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4767 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004768 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4769 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4770 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4771 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4772 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4773 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004774
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004775- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4776 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4777 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4778 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4779
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004780- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4781 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4782 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4783
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004784- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4785 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4786 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4787 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4788
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004789- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4790 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004792 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4793 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4794 new -l and -e options.
4795
4796- statcache is now deprecated.
4797
4798- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4799 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004801 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4802 time properly taken into account.
4803
4804- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4805 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4806 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4807 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4808
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004809Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004811
4812Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004814
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004815- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4816 is built with libdb3 if available.
4817
4818- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4819
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004820C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004822
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004823- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4824 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4825 PySequence_Size().
4826
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004827- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4828
4829- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4830 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4831 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4832
4833- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4834 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4835
4836- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4837 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4838
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004839New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004841
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004842- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4843 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4844
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004845- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4846 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4847
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004848- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4849
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004850Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004852
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004853- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4854 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4855
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004856Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004858
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004859Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004861
4862- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4863 removed completely in the next release.
4864
4865- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4866 OSX.
4867
4868- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4869 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4870
4871- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4872
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004873
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004874What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004875===========================
4876
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004877*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4878
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004879Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004881
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004882- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004883 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004884 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004885 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4886 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004887 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4888 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004889 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4890 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004891
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004892- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4893 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4894
4895- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4896 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4897
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004898Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004899-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004900
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004901- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4902 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4903 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4904 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4905 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4906 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4907 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4908 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4909
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004910- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4911 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4912 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4913 example).
4914
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004915- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004916 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004917 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004918 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004919
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004920- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4921 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4922 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004923 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004924
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004925- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4926 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4927 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4928 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4929 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4930 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4931
4932 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4933
4934 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4935
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004936Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004938
4939- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4940
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004941- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4942
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004943- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4944 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004945
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004946- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4947 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4948 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4949 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4950 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4951 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004952 attributes.
4953
4954- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4955 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4956 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004957
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004958- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4959 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4960 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004961
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004962- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4963 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4964 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004965 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4966 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4967
4968- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4969 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004970
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004971Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004973
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004974- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4975 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4976
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004977- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4978 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4979 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4980 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4981
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004982- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4983 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4984 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4985 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4986
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004987 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4988 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4989 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4990 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4991 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4992 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4993 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4994 without losing information).
4995
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004996- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004997 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4998 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4999 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5000 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5001 module).
5002
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005003 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005004 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5005 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5006 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5007 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005008
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005009- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005010 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5011 encoding.
5012
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005013- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5014 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005017 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5018
5019- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5020 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5021 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5022 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5023
5024- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5025
5026- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5027 ON, and OFF.
5028
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005029- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5030 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5031
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005032Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005034
5035- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5036 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5037 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005038
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005039- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5040 been added: -X and -E.
5041
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005042Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005044
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005045- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5046 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5047
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005048C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005050
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005051- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5052 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5053 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5054 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5055 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5056
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005057- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5058 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5059 as long) arguments.
5060
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005061- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5062 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5063 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5064 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5065 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5066 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5067
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005068- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5069 input.
5070
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005071New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005073
5074Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005075-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005076
5077Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005079
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005080- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5081 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5082 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5083
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005084- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5085 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5086 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005087 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5090 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5091 import signal
5092 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005095 while 1:
5096 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005098 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5099 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5100 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5101 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005102
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005103
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005104What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5105===========================
5106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5108
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005109Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005111
5112- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5113 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5114 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5115
5116- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5117 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5118 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5119 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5120 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5121 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5122 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005123
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005124- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005125 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005126 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5127 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5128 associate a docstring with a property.
5129
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005130- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5131 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5132 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5133 other built-in object types.
5134
5135- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5136 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5137 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5138 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5139 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5140
5141- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5142 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5143
5144- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5145 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005146 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005147 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5148 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5149 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5150 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5151 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5152
5153- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5154 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5155 class.
5156
5157- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5158 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5159 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5160 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5161
5162- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5163 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5164 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5165 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5166
5167- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5168 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5169
5170- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5171 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5172 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5173 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5174 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005175 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005176 with the same value as s.
5177
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005178- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5179
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005180Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005182
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005183- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5184
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005185- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5186 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5187 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5188 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5189 objects.
5190
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005191- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5192 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005193 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5194 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5195
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005196- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5197 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5198 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5199
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005200Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005202
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005203- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5204 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5205 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5206 by the instances.
5207
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005208- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5209 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5210 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5211
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005212- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5213 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5214 before the entire comparison is complete.
5215
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005216- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5217 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5218 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5219
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005220- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5221 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5222 getwriter().
5223
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005224- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5225 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5226
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005227- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005228 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5229 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5230
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005231- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5232 iterable object.
5233
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005234- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5235 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005236
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005237- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5238 authentication.
5239
5240- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5241 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005242
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005243- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005244 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5245 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5246 a sample driver.)
5247
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005248Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005250
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005251- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5252 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5253 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5254 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5255 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5256 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5257 kernel has large file support.
5258
5259- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5260 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5261 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5262 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5263 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5264
5265- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5266 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5267 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5268
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005269C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005271
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005272- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5273 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5274
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005275New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005276-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005277
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005278- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5279 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5280
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005281Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005283
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005284- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5285 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5286 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5287 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5288 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5289
5290- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5291 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5292 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5293 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5294
5295- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5296 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5297
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005298Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005300
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005301- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005302 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5303 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005304
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005305
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005306What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5307===========================
5308
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5310
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005311Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005313
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005314- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5315 big to represent as a C double.
5316
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005317- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5318 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5319 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5320 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5321 restriction).
5322
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005323- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5324 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5325 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5326 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5327 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5328
5329 >>> dir([])
5330 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5331 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5332 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5333 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5334 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5335 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5336 'reverse', 'sort']
5337
5338 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5339
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005340- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005341 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5342 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5343 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5344 OverflowError exception.
5345
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005346- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005347 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005348 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5349 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5350 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5351 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5352 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005353 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5355 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5356
5357 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5358 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5359 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5360 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005361
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005362- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005363 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5364 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5365 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5366 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5367 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5368 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5369 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5370 once it is created.
5371
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005372- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5373 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5374 (key, value) pairs.
5375
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005376- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005377 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5378 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5379
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005380- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5381 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5382 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5383 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5384 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005385
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005386- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005387 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5388 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5389
5390 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005392- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005393 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5394
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005395Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005397
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005398- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005399 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5400 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005401
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005402- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5403 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5404 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5405 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5406 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5407 in this area anymore).
5408
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005409- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5410 threading.Timer.
5411
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005412- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5413 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5414
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005415- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005416 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5417
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005418- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005419 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5420 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5421 converted to Python longs.
5422
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005423- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005424 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5425
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005426- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5427 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5428 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5429
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005430Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005432
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005433- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5434 division operators as per PEP 238.
5435
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005436Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005438
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005439- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5440 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5441 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5442 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5443
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005444C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005446
5447- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005448
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005449- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5450 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005451 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005452
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005453 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5454 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005455 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005456 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005457
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005458- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005459 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5460 module:
5461
5462 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005463
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005464 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5465 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005466
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005467 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5468 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005469
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005470 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5471
5472 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5473
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005474- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005475 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5476 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5477 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005478
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005479New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005481
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005482- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5483 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5484 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5485 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5486 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005487
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005488Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005489-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005490
5491Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005493
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005494- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5495 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5496 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5497 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005498 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5499 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5500 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5501 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5502 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005503
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005504- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005505 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5506
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005507
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005508What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5509===========================
5510
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5512
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005513Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005514-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005515
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005516- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5517 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5518
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005519- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5520 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5521 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005522
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005523- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5524 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5525 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5526 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005527
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005528- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5529
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005531
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005532Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005534
5535- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005536 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005537 the module docstring for details.
5538
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005539Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005540-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005541
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005542- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005543 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5544 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5545 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005546
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005547- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5548 Nick Mathewson.
5549
5550Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005551----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005552
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005553- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5554 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5555 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5556 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5557 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5558 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5559 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5560 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5561
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005562- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5563 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5564 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5565 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5566
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005567- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5568 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5569 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5570 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5571 come a long way).
5572
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005573- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5574 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5575 write filters for these warnings).
5576
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005577- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5578 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5579 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5580 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5581 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5582
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005583- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5584 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5585 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5586 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5587 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5588 older distribution.
5589
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005590Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005591-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005592
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005593- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5594 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005595 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005596
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005597- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5598 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5599 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5600
5601- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5602
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005603- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5604
5605- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5606
5607- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5608
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005610
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005611- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5612
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005613New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005615
5616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005618
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005619- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5620 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5621 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5622 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5623 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5624 against buffer overruns.
5625
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005626- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005627 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5628 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005629 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5630 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5631 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5632
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005633- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5634 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5635 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5636 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5637 deprecated.
5638
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005639Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005641
5642- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5643 relevant is found.
5644
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005645
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005646What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005647===========================
5648
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005649*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5650
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005651Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005652----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005653
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005654- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5655 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5656 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5657 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5658 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5659 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5660 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5661 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005662 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005663 repaired.
5664
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005665- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005666 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005667 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5668 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5669 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5670 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5671 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5672 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5673 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5674 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5675
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005676- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5677 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5678 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5679 leading BMO character).
5680
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005681- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5682 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5683 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5684
5685 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5686 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5687 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005688
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005689 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5690 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5691 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5692 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5693 for various simple to use conversions.
5694
5695 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5696 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5697
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005698 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5699 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5700 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5701 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5702 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5703 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5704 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5705 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5706 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5707 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5708 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5709 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5710 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5711 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5712 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005713
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005714- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5715 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5716 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005717 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005718 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005719
5720 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005721 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5722 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5723 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5724 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5725 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005726 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5727 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005728
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005729 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5730 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5731 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005732 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005733
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005734- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5735 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5736 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5737 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5738 floating arithmetic,
5739
5740 x = 9007199254740992.0
5741 print long(x)
5742
5743 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5744 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5745 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5746 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5747 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5748 functions are of good quality).
5749
5750 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5751 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5752 algorithms to break.
5753
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005754- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5755 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5756 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5757 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5758 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5759 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5760 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5761 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5762 order.
5763
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005764- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5765 operation along the most common code paths.
5766
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005767- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5768 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5769
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005770- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5771 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5772 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5773 {}.update(UserDict())
5774
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005775- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5776 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5777 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5778 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5779 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5780 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5781 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5782 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5783
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005784- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005785 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005786
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005787 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005788 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5789 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005790 join() method of strings
5791 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005792 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5793 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005794 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005795 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005796
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005797- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5798 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5799
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005800- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5801 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5802
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005803- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5804 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5805 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5806 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5807
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005808- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5809 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005810 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005811 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5812 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005813
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005814- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5815
5816
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005817Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005818-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005819
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005820- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005821 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005822 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5823 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5824
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005825- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5826 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5827
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005828- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5829 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5830 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5831 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5832
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005833- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5834 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5835 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5836
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005837- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5838
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005839- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5840
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005841- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5842 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5843 that are still imported into string.py).
5844
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005845- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5846
5847- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5848 Now it does.
5849
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005850- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5851
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005852- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5853 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5854 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5855 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5856 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005857 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5858 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005859
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005860- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5861 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5862 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5863 'help(object)'.
5864
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005865Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005866-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005867
5868- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005869 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005870 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5871 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5872
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005873- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005874 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5875 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005876
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005877C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005878-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005879
5880- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5881 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005882
5883----
5884
5885**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**