blob: 0912e00e5dc47d5d0f50370f81d2d6a64eefbb82 [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
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000013- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
14 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
15
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000016- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000017 an ferror() call.
18
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000019- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
20 list.sort().
21
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000022- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
23 (2+3) --> (5).
24
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000025- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
26
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000027- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
28 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000030- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
31 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
32 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034Extension Modules
35-----------------
36
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000037- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
38
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000039- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
40 {remove_history,replace_history}
41
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000042- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
43 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000044
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000045- stat_float_times is now True.
46
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000047- array.array objects are now picklable.
48
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000049- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
50 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
51
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000052- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
53 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
54 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
55
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000056- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
57 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000058
59Library
60-------
61
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000062- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
63
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000064- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
65
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000066- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
67
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000068- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
69
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000070- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
71
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000072- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
73 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
74 be exploited in various ways.
75
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000076- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
77
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000078- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
79
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000080- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
81
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000082- Enhancements to the csv module:
83
84 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
85 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
86 PEP 305.
87 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
88 reporting.
89 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
90 dictates.
91 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000092 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000093 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000094 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
95 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000096 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
97 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000098 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000099 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
100 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
101 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
102 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
103 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
104 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
105 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
106 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
107 without first creating a dialect class.
108 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
109 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
110 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000111 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000112 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
113 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000114 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
115 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
116 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
117 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000118 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
119 This has been fixed.
120
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000121- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
122 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
123 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
124 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
125
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000126- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
127
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000128- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
129 (Bug #951915).
130
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000131- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
132 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
133 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
134 encoding alias table
135
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000136- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
137
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000138- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
139 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
140
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000141- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
142
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000143- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
144
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000145- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
146
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000147- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
148
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000149- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
150
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000151- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
152 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
153 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
154
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000155- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000156 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000157
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000158- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
159 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
160 tokenizer with very long source lines.
161
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000162- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
163 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
164
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000165- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
166 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000167
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000168- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
169 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
170
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000171Build
172-----
173
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000174- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
175 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
176
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000177- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
178 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
179 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
180 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
181 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
182 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
183 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
184 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
185
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000186- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
187 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
188 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
189 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
190
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000191
192C API
193-----
194
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000195- Removed PyRange_New().
196
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000197
198Tests
199-----
200
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000201- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000202
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000203
204Documentation
205-------------
206
207- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
208 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
209 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
210
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000211Mac
212---
213
214
215
216Tools/Demos
217-----------
218
219
220
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000221What's New in Python 2.4 final?
222===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000223
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000224*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000225
226Core and builtins
227-----------------
228
229- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
230 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
231 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
232
233
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000234What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
235==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000236
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000237*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000238
239Core and builtins
240-----------------
241
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000242- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
243 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
244 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
245
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000246
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000247Library
248-------
249
250- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
251 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
252 raised is re-raised.
253
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000254- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
255 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
256
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000257- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
258 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
259 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
260 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
261 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
262 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
263 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
264 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
265 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
266 by the slice are recomputed now.
267
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000268- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000269
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000270Build
271-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000272
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000273- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
274 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
275 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000276
277C API
278-----
279
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000280- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
281
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000282
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000283What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
284================================
285
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000286*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000287
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000288License
289-------
290
291The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
292is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
293changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
294Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
295intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
296durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
297the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
298License::
299
300 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
301
302says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
303to Python 2.1.1.
304
305The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
306License Version 2.
307
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000308Core and builtins
309-----------------
310
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000311- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
312 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
313 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
314 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
315 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
316 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
317 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
318 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
319 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
320 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
321
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000322- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000323
324Extension Modules
325-----------------
326
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000327- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
328 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
329 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
330 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000331
332Library
333-------
334
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000335- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
336 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
337 returned.
338
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000339- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
340
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000341- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
342 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
343
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000344- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
345
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000346- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
347 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000348
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000349- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
350
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000351- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
352
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000353- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000354 the source code is updated and reloaded.
355
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000356Build
357-----
358
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000359- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000360
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000361What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
362================================
363
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000364*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000365
366Core and builtins
367-----------------
368
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000369- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000370 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
371
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000372- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
373 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
374 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
375 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
376
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000377- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
378 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
379
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000380- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
381 constant.
382
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000383- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
384 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
385 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
386 large), and to anomalies such as
387 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
388 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
389 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
390 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000391
392Extension modules
393-----------------
394
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000395- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
396 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000397 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
398 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
399 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000400
401Library
402-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000403
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000404- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000405 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000406 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
407 --swig-cpp.
408
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000409- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
410 it is set.
411
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000412- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000413
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000414- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
415 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
416 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
417 Closes bug #1039270.
418
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000419- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000420
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000421 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000422 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
423 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
424 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
425 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
426 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
427 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
428 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
429 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
430 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
431 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
432 + Updates to documentation.
433
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000434- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
435 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
436 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
437 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
438
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000439- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000440
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000441- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
442 applications should use the getmember function.
443
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000444- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
445
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000446- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
447 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
448 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
449 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
450 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
451 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
452 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
453 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
454 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
455
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000456- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
457 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000458 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000459
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000460- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
461 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
462 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
463 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
464 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
465 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
466 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
467 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000468
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000469- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
470 the new public features (of which there are many).
471
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000472- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000473 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
474 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
475 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
476 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000477 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000478
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000479- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
480
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000481- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
482 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
483 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
484 options.
485
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000486- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
487 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
488 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
489 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
490 conditions under which non-string values work.
491
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000492Build
493-----
494
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000495- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
496 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
497 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
498
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000499- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
500 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
501 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
502 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
503 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000504
505C API
506-----
507
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000508- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
509 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
510
511- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
512
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000513- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
514 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
515 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
516 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
517 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
518 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
519 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
520 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
521 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
522
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000523- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
524
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000525- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
526 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
527 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000528
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000529Tests
530-----
531
532- test__locale ported to unittest
533
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000534Mac
535---
536
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000537- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
538 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
539 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000540
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000541Tools/Demos
542-----------
543
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000544- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
545 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
546 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
547 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
548 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000549
550
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000551What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
552=================================
553
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000554*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000555
556Core and builtins
557-----------------
558
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000559- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000560 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
561
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000562- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
563 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
564 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
565 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
566 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
567 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
568 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
569 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000570 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
571 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
572 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
573 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
574 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000575
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000576- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
577 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
578 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
579 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
580 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
581
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000582- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
583
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000584- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
585 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
586
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000587- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
588 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
589 modified the list.
590
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000591- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
592 functions is now writable.
593
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000594- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
595 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
596 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
597 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
598
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000599- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
600 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
601 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
602 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
603 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000604
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000605- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
606 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
607
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000608Extension modules
609-----------------
610
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000611- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
612
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000613- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
614 data.
615
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000616- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
617 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
618 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
619 supposed to have been truncated away.
620
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000621- Added socket.socketpair().
622
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000623- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
624 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
625
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000626- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000627 versions of Python, have now been removed.
628
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000629Library
630-------
631
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000632- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000633 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000634
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000635- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
636 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
637
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000638- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
639 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
640
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000641- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
642
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000643- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
644 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000645
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000646- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
647 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
648
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000649- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
650
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000651- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
652
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000653- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
654
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000655- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
656 Percivall.
657
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000658- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
659 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
660
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000661- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
662 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
663 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000664 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000665
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000666- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
667 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
668 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
669 and exponent.
670
671- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
672
673- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
674 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
675 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
676
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000677- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
678 to the readline module.
679
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000680- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000681 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
682 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000683
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000684- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
685 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
686 contains symlinks.
687
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000688- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
689 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
690
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000691- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
692 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
693 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
694
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000695- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
696 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
697 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
698 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
699 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
700 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
701 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
702 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
703 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
704 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
705 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
706 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
707 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
708
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000709- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
710
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000711Tools/Demos
712-----------
713
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000714- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
715 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
716
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000717- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
718
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000719Build
720-----
721
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000722- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
723 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
724 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
725 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
726 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
727 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
728 plans to do so.
729
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000730- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
731 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
732
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000733- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
734 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
735
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000736- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
737 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
738
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000739- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
740 GNU/k*BSD systems.
741
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000742- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
743 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
744
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000745C API
746-----
747
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000748..
749
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000750Documentation
751-------------
752
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000753- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
754 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
755
756- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
757 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
758 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000759
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000760New platforms
761-------------
762
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000763- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
764
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000765Tests
766-----
767
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000768..
769
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000770Windows
771-------
772
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000773- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
774 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
775 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
776 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
777 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
778 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
779 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
780 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
781 the problem.
782
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000783Mac
784---
785
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000786..
787
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000788
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000789What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
790=================================
791
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000792*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000793
794Core and builtins
795-----------------
796
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000797- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
798 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
799 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
800 sensitive code.
801
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000802- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000803 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000804
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000805 @staticmethod
806 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000807
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000808 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000809
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000810- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
811 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
812 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
813 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
814 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
815 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
816 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
817 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
818 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
819 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
820 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
821
822 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
823 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
824 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
825 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
826 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
827 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
828 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
829
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000830- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
831 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
832
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000833- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000834 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000835
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000836- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000837 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000838 which was missing for no apparent reason.
839
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000840- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000841 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
842 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
843
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000844- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
845 types that support garbage collection.
846
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000847- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
848
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000849- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
850 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
851 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
852 Jython.
853
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000854- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
855
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000856- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
857 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
858
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000859- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
860 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
861 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000862
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000863- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
864 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
865 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
866
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000867Extension modules
868-----------------
869
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000870- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
871
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000872Library
873-------
874
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000875- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
876 TIS-620
877
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000878- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
879 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
880 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
881 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
882 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
883 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
884 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
885 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
886 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
887 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
888
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000889- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
890
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000891- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
892 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
893 same as when the argument is omitted).
894 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
895
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000896- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
897
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000898- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
899 schemes are offered.
900
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000901- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
902
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000903- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
904 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
905 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
906
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000907- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
908
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000909- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
910 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
911
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000912- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
913 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
914 when dummy_threading is being used.
915
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000916- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
917 from a tarfile.
918
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000919- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000920 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000921
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000922- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
923 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
924 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
925 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
926
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000927- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
928 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
929
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000930- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
931 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
932 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
933 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
934 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
935 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
936 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
937 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
938 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
939 by some other method in progress).
940
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000941- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
942 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
943 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000944
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000945- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
946
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000947- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
948 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
949 AM Kuchling.
950
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000951- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
952 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
953 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
954
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000955- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
956 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
957 instead of unsigned.
958
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000959- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000960 no longer part of the public API.
961
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000962- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
963 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
964 string methods of the same name).
965
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000966- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000967 SF patch 945642.
968
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000969- doctest unittest integration improvements:
970
971 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
972
973 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
974 DocTestSuites.
975
976- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
977 that provide thread-local data.
978
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000979- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
980 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
981
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000982- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
983
984- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
985 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
986 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
987
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000988- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
989
990 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
991 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
992 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000993
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000994 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
995 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
996 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
997 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
998
999 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1000 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1001
1002 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1003 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1004 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1005 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1006
1007 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1008 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1009 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1010 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1011 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1012
1013 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1014 wrapping help output.
1015
1016 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1017 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1018 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001019
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001020C API
1021-----
1022
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001023- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1024 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1025 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1026 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1027 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1028 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1029 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1030 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1031 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1032 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1033 its visible semantics have not changed.
1034
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001035- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1036 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1037
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001038Documentation
1039-------------
1040
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001041- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001042
1043 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001044 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001045
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001046 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001047
1048 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1049
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001050- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001051
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001052Tests
1053-----
1054
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001055- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001056 platforms that use the Makefile.
1057
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001058- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1059 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1060 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1061
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001062
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001063What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1064=================================
1065
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001066*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001067
1068Core and builtins
1069-----------------
1070
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001071- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1072 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1073 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1074 objects now (one object instead of three).
1075
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001076- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1077 Windows DLLs.
1078
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001079- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1080 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001081
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001082- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1083 a new .pyc magic.
1084
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001085- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1086 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1087 be there.
1088
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001089- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1090 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1091 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1092
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001093- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1094 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1095 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1096
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001097- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1098
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001099- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1100 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1101 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001102
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001103- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1104 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1105
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001106- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1107
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001108- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001109 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001110
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001111- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1112
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001113- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1114
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001115- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1116 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1117
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001118- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1119 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1120 Fixes bug #858016 .
1121
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001122- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1123 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1124 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1125
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001126- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1127 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1128 improves their performance (about 35%).
1129
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001130- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1131 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1132 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1133
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001134- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1135 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1136 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1137 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1138
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001139- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1140 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1141 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1142 length is not known).
1143
1144- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1145 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001146 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1147 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001148 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1149
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001150- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1151 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1152
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001153- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1154 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1155 keyword arguments.
1156
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001157- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1158 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1159 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1160
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001161- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1162 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1163 cases.
1164
1165- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1166 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1167 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1168 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1169 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1170 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1171 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1172 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1173 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1174 a release build.
1175
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001176- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1177 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1178
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001179- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001180 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001181
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001182- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1183 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1184 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1185 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1186 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1187 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1188 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1189 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1190 destroyed.
1191
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001192- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1193 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1194 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1195 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1196 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1197 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1198 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1199 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1200
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001201- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1202 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1203 character other than a space.
1204
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001205- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1206 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1207 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1208 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1209 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1210 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1211 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1212 attributes with the same name.
1213
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001214- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1215 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1216 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1217 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1218 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1219 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1220 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1221 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1222 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1223 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1224 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1225 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1226 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1227 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001228
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001229- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1230 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1231 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1232 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1233 This has been repaired.
1234
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001235- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1236
1237- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1238
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001239- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1240 over a sequence.
1241
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001242- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001243 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001244
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001245- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1246
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001247- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1248 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1249 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1250 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1251 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1252 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1253 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1254 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1255
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001256- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1257 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1258 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1259
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001260- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1261 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1262 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1263 freelist.
1264
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001265- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1266 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1267
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001268- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1269 number.
1270
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001271- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1272 a TypeError exception.
1273
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001274- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1275 820195.
1276
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001277- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1278 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1279 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1280
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001281- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001282 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1283 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001284
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001285- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1286 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1287 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1288
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001289- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1290 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001291 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001292
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001293- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001294 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1295 the first call.
1296
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001297
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001298Extension modules
1299-----------------
1300
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001301- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1302 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1303
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001304- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1305 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1306 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1307 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1308 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1309 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1310 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001311
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001312- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1313
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001314- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1315
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001316- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1317 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1318
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001319- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1320 fewer false positives.
1321
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001322- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1323 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1324
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001325- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001326 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1327
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001328- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001329 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001330 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001331 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1332 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001333
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001334- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1335 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1336 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1337 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1338
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001339- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1340 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1341 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1342 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1343 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1344 #897625.
1345
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001346- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1347 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1348
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001349- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1350 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1351 and pops on either side of the deque.
1352
1353- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1354 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1355
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001356- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1357 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1358 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1359 other functions that expect a function argument.
1360
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001361- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1362
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001363- os.getsid was added.
1364
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001365- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1366 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1367 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1368
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001369- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1370
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001371- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1372
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001373- readline.clear_history was added.
1374
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001375- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1376
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001377- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1378
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001379- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1380
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001381- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1382
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001383- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1384
1385- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1386
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001387- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1388
1389- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1390
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001391- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1392 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1393 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1394
1395- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1396 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1397 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1398 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1399 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1400 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1401 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1402
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001403- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1404 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1405 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1406 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001407
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001408- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001409 iterators from a single iterable.
1410
1411- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1412 of raising a TypeError exception.
1413
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001414- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1415 as parameter.
1416
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001417Library
1418-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001419
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001420- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1421 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1422 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001423
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001424- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1425 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1426 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001427
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001428- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001429
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001430- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1431 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001432
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001433- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1434 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1435
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001436- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1437
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001438- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001439 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001440
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001441- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001442 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001443
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001444- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1445
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001446- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1447 on cygwin and mingw32.
1448
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001449- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1450
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001451- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1452 module.
1453
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001454- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1455 installation scheme for all platforms.
1456
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001457- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001458 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001459
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001460- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1461 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1462 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1463
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001464- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1465 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1466 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1467
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001468- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1469
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001470- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1471
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001472- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1473 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1474
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001475- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1476 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1477 type pattern with the same value exists.
1478
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001479- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1480 when run from the command prompt).
1481
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001482- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1483 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1484
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001485- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1486 default sort).
1487
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001488- Added global runctx function to profile module
1489
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001490- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1491
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001492- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1493
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001494- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1495
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001496- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001497 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1498 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1499 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1500 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1501 accordingly.
1502
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001503- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1504 decoding standards.
1505
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001506- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1507 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1508 called for all requests.
1509
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001510- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1511 they are passed to the compiler.
1512
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001513- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1514 indent, width and depth.
1515
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001516- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1517 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1518
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001519- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1520 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1521
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001522- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1523
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001524- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1525
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001526- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1527
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001528- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1529 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1530
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001531- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001532 for better performance.
1533
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001534- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001535
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001536- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1537 a string).
1538
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001539- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1540
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001541- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1542
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001543- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1544
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001545- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1546
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001547- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1548 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1549 list of fieldnames.
1550
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001551- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1552 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1553
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001554- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1555
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001556- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1557 empty lists.
1558
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001559- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1560 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1561 and shelves.
1562
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001563- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1564 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1565
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001566- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001567 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1568 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001569
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001570- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1571 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001572 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001573
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001574- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001575 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1576 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1577
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001578- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1579 and removed in Py2.4.
1580
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001581- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1582
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001583- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1584
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001585Tools/Demos
1586-----------
1587
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001588- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1589 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1590
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001591- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1592
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001593- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1594 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1595 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1596 destination in situations where both files are given.
1597
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001598- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1599 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1600 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1601 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1602
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001603- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1604
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001605- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1606 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1607 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1608 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1609 now.
1610
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001611- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1612 in effect
1613
1614- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1615 C-c C-h
1616
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001617- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1618 -d option was given.
1619
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001620Build
1621-----
1622
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001623- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1624 build under OS X.
1625
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001626- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1627 --enable-profiling.
1628
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001629- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1630 is configured --with-tsc.
1631
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001632- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1633 on AMD64.
1634
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001635- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1636 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1637
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001638- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1639 removed.
1640
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001641- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1642 supported (see PEP 11).
1643
1644- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1645
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001646- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1647
1648- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1649 (see PEP 11).
1650
1651- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1652 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1653
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001654C API
1655-----
1656
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001657- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1658 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1659 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1660
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001661- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1662 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1663 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1664 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1665
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001666- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1667 generator objects.
1668
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001669- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1670 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001671 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1672 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001673
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001674- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1675 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1676
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001677- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1678 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1679 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1680 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1681 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1682
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001683- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1684 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1685 about 10% faster.
1686
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001687- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1688 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1689
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001690- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1691 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1692 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1693 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1694
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001695Windows
1696-------
1697
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001698- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1699 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1700 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1701 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1702
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001703- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1704 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1705 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1706
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001707
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001708What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1709===============================
1710
1711*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1712
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001713IDLE
1714----
1715
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001716- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1717 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1718 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1719 context-menu actions.
1720
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001721- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1722 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1723 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1724 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1725 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1726 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1727 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1728 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1729 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1730
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001731
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001732What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1733=============================================
1734
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001735*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001736
1737Core and builtins
1738-----------------
1739
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001740- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001741 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001742 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1743
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001744Extension modules
1745-----------------
1746
1747- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1748 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1749 than once. This has been fixed.
1750
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001751- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1752 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1753 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1754 call.
1755
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001756- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1757
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001758Library
1759-------
1760
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001761- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1762 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1763
1764- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1765 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1766 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1767 restored.
1768
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001769IDLE
1770----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001771
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001772- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001773
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001774Build
1775-----
1776
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001777- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1778 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1779
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001780C API
1781-----
1782
1783Windows
1784-------
1785
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001786- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1787 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1788
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001789- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1790
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001791Mac
1792---
1793
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001794- Various fixes to pimp.
1795
1796- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1797
1798- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1799 more problems than it solves.
1800
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001801
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001802What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1803=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001804
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001805*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1806
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001807Core and builtins
1808-----------------
1809
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001810- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1811 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1812
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001813- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1814 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001815 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001816
1817- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1818 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1819 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001820 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821
1822- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1823 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001824
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001825- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1826 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1827 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1828
1829- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001830 770247.
1831
1832- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001833
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001834Extension modules
1835-----------------
1836
1837- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1838 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1839
1840- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1841
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001842- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1843
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001844- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1845 contained within the _strptime module.
1846
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001847- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1848 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1849
1850- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001851 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1852
1853- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1854 the find_class attribute, if present.
1855
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001856- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001857
1858 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1859 (SF bug 763298).
1860
1861 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001862 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1863 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1864 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001865
1866 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1867
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001868Library
1869-------
1870
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001871- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1872
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001873- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1874 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1875 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1876 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1877 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1878 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1879 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1880 or Tester().
1881
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001882- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1883 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1884 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1885 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1886 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1887 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1888 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1889 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1890 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001891
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001892 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001893
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001894- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1895 weren't before was an oversight.
1896
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001897- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1898 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1899
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001900- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1901 when there are no lines.
1902
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001903- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1904 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1905
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001906- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1907 to child processes.
1908
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001909- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1910
1911- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1912
1913- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1914 xmlrpclib.
1915
1916- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1917 responses.
1918
1919- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1920 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1921
1922- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1923 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1924 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1925
1926- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1927 used as patterns.
1928
1929- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1930 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1931 than Tk 8.3.
1932
1933- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1934
1935- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001936
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001937Tools/Demos
1938-----------
1939
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001940- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1941
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001942- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1943
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001944- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001945
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001946Build
1947-----
1948
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001949- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1950
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001951- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1952
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001953- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1954 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001955
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001956- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1957 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1958 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001959
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001960C API
1961-----
1962
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001963- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1964 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1965
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001966Windows
1967-------
1968
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001969- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1970 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1971 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1972 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1973 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1974 Python exception ::
1975
1976 thread.error: can't start new thread
1977
1978 is raised now.
1979
1980- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1981 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1982 instead of from DLL teardown.
1983
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001984Mac
1985---
1986
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001987- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001988 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001989 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1990 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1991 the executable in the bundle.
1992
1993- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001994
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001995- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1996
1997- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1998 on Panther.
1999
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002000What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2001================================
2002
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002003*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002004
2005Core and builtins
2006-----------------
2007
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002008- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2009 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2010 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2011 with the -i option.
2012
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002013- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2014 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2015
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002016- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2017 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2018
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002019- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2020 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2021 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2022 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2023 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2024 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2025 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2026 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2027 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2028 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2029 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2030 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2031 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002032
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002033- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2034 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2035 embedded in a lambda expression.
2036
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002037- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2038 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2039 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2040 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2041 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2042
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002043- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2044 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2045 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2046
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002047- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2048 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2049
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002050- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2051 It's writable again.
2052
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002053- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2054 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2055 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002056 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002057
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002058- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2059 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2060 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2061
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002062Extension modules
2063-----------------
2064
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002065- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2066 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2067
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002068- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2069 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2070 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2071 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2072
2073- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2074 collection.
2075
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002076- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2077 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2078 unique within a single program run.
2079
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002080- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2081 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2082
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002083- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2084 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2085
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002086- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2087 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002088
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002089- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2090
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002091- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2092 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2093
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002094- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2095 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2096 for many BSD-derived systems.
2097
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002098
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002099Library
2100-------
2101
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002102- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2103 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2104 primary ones:
2105
2106 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2107 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2108 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2109
2110 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2111 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2112 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2113 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2114 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2115 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2116
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002117- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2118 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2119 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2120 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2121 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2122 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2123 argument.
2124
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002125- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2126 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2127 in the archive.
2128
2129- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2130 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2131
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002132- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2133 569574).
2134
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002135- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2136 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2137 no more.
2138
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002139- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2140 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2141 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2142 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2143 code coverage.
2144
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002145- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2146 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2147 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002148 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2149 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002150
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002151- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2152 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2153 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002154 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002155
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002156- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2157
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002158- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2159 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2160 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2161 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2162
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002163- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2164 handling.
2165
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002166- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2167 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2168
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002169- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2170 in socket.py.
2171
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002172- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2173
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002174- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2175 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2176 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2177 opener with proxy support.
2178
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002179- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2180
2181- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2182
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002183Tools/Demos
2184-----------
2185
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002186- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2187
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002188- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2189
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002190- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2191 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002192
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002193- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2194 files.
2195
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002196Build
2197-----
2198
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002199- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002200 different root directory.
2201
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002202C API
2203-----
2204
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002205- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2206 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2207 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2208 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2209 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2210 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2211 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2212 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2213 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2214 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2215
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002216- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2217 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2218 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2219 from Python.
2220
2221
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002222New platforms
2223-------------
2224
2225None this time.
2226
2227Tests
2228-----
2229
2230- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2231 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2232
2233Windows
2234-------
2235
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002236- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2237
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002238- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2239 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2240 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2241 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2242 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2243 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2244 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2245 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2246 that's what it's for.
2247
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002248Mac
2249---
2250
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002251- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2252 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2253 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2254 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002255- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2256 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2257- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002258
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002259SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2260------------------------------------
2261
2262430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2263598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2264622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2265661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2266683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2267697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2268713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2269724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2270727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2271729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2272730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2273731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2274732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2275733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2276735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2277740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2278744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2279745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2280747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2281749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2282751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2283753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2284755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2285757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2286760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2287
2288
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002289What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2290================================
2291
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002292*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002293
2294Core and builtins
2295-----------------
2296
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002297- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2298 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2299
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002300- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2301 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2302 and cannot be strings).
2303
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002304- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2305 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2306 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2307 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2308
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002309- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2310 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2311 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2312 Python itself.
2313
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002314- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2315 the referenced object, if it has one.
2316
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002317- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2318 the thread started at
2319 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2320
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002321- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2322 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2323 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2324 placed on a list index.
2325
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002326- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2327 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2328 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2329 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2330
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002331- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2332 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2333 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2334 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2335 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2336 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2337 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2338
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002339- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2340 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2341 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2342 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2343 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2344
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002345- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2346 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002347
2348- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2349 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2350 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2351 #693195.)
2352
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002353- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2354 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002355
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002356- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002357 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002358 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2359 interpreter executions, would fail.
2360
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002361- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002362 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002363 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002364
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002365Extension modules
2366-----------------
2367
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002368- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2369 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2370 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2371 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2372
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002373- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2374 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2375
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002376- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2377 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2378 and Greg Chapman.)
2379
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002380- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2381 recursively.
2382
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002383- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002384 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2385 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2386 leaks.
2387
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002388- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2389
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002390- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2391 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2392 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2393 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2394 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2395 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2396 #705836.
2397
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002398- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002399 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2400
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002401- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2402 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2403 See SF bug #692416.
2404
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002405- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2406 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2407
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002408- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2409 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2410 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002411
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002412- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002413 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2414 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2415
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002416- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2417 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2418 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2419 timeouts to work properly.
2420
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002421Library
2422-------
2423
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002424- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2425 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2426 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2427 future release.
2428
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002429- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2430 for querying platform dependent features.
2431
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002432- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002433
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002434- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2435 pickle protocol versions.
2436
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002437- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2438 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2439 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2440
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002441- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2442
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002443- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2444 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2445 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2446 modules.
2447
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002448- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2449 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2450 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2451
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002452- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2453 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2454
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002455- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2456 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2457 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2458
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002459- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002460 MS Office extensions.
2461
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002462- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2463 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2464
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002465- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2466 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2467
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002468- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2469 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2470 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2471 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2472 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2473 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2474
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002475- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2476 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2477 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002478
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002479- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2480 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2481 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2482
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002483- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2484
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002485- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2486 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2487 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2488
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002489Tools/Demos
2490-----------
2491
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002492- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2493 See the module docstring for details.
2494
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002495Build
2496-----
2497
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002498- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2499 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002500
2501C API
2502-----
2503
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002504- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2505
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002506- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2507 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2508 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2509
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002510- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2511 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002512
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002513 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2514 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2515 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002516
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002517- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002518 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2519
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002520- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2521 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2522 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002523
2524New platforms
2525-------------
2526
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002527None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002528
2529Tests
2530-----
2531
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002532- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2533 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002534
2535Windows
2536-------
2537
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002538- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2539 function.
2540
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002541- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2542 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002543
2544Mac
2545---
2546
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002547- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2548 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002549
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002550- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2551 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002552
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002553- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2554 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2555 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002556
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002557- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002558 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2559 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002560
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002561- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2562 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002563
2564
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002565What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2566=================================
2567
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002568*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002569
2570Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002571-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002572
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002573- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2574 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2575 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2576
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002577- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2578 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2579 (SF patch #664376.)
2580
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002581- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2582 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2583 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2584 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2585 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2586 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002587 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002588
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002589- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2590 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2591 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2592 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002593 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002594
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002595- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2596 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2597 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2598 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2599 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2600 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2601 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2602 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2603 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2604 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2605 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2606
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002607- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2608 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2609 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2610 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2611 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2612 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2613
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002614- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2615 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2616
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002617- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2618 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2619 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2620 case.)
2621
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002622- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2623 passed as unicode strings.
2624
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002625- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2626 See SF bug #683467.
2627
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002628- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2629 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2630
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002631- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2632
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002633- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2634
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002635- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2636 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2637 arguments.
2638
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002639- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2640 See SF bug #667147.
2641
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002642- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002643 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002644 See SF bug #676155.
2645
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002646- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002647 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002648 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2649 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2650 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2651 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2652 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2653 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002655Extension modules
2656-----------------
2657
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002658- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2659 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2660 tp_as_number pointer.
2661
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002662- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2663 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2664 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2665 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2666 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2667
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002668- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2669
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002670- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2671
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002672- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002673 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002674 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2675 patch #678531.)
2676
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002677- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2678 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2679
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002680- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2681 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2682
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002683- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2684
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002685- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2686 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2687 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2688
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002689- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2690
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002691- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2692 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2693
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002694- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002695
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002696- datetime changes:
2697
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002698 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2699
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002700 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2701 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2702 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2703 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2704 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2705 now.
2706
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002707 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002708 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2709 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002710
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002711 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002712 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002713 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2714 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2715 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2716 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002717
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002718 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2719 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2720 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002721 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2722
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002723 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2724 by a later example coded by Guido.
2725
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002726 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002727 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2728 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2729 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002730 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2731 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2732
2733 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2734 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2735 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2736 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2737 tzinfo subclass instance.
2738
2739 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2740 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2741 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2742 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2743 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2744 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2745 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2746 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002747
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002748 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2749 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2750 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2751 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2752 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002753 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2754
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002755 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002756
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002757 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2758 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2759 as a naive datetime object.
2760
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002761 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2762 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2763 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2764
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002765 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2766 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2767 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2768 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2769 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2770 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2771 comparison.
2772
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002773 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2774 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2775 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2776 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002777 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002778
2779 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002780
2781 and ::
2782
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002783 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2784
2785 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2786 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2787 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2788 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2789
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002790 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2791 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2792 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2793 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2794 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2795
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002796 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2797 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002798 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2799 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002801Library
2802-------
2803
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002804- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2805 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2806
2807- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2808 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2809 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2810 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2811 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2812 See PEP 307 for details.
2813
2814- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2815 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2816
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002817- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2818 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002819 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002820 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2821 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002822 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002823
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002824- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2825 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2826
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002827- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2828 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2829 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2830
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002831- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2832
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002833- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2834 exception.
2835
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002836- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2837 class.
2838
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002839- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2840 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2841 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2842
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002843- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2844 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2845
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002846- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002847 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2848 See SF bug #659228.
2849
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002850- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2851 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2852 See SF patch #651082.
2853
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002854- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002855
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002856- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2857 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2858
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002859- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002860 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002861
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002862- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2863 DOS paths from other platforms.
2864
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002865Tools/Demos
2866-----------
2867
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002868- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2869 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2870 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2871 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2872 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2873 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2874 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2875 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2876 example:
2877
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002878 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2879 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002880
2881 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2882
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002883
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002884Build
2885-----
2886
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002887- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2888 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2889 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002890 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2891
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002892 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2893
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002894- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2895 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2896 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2897 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2898 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2899 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2900 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2901 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2902 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2903
2904- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2905 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2906 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2907 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2908
2909- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2910 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2911
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002912C API
2913-----
2914
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002915- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2916 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002917
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002918- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2919 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2920 tp_as_number pointer.
2921
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002922- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2923 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2924 (SF #681367)
2925
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002926- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2927 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2928 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2929 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002930
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002931Tests
2932-----
2933
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002934- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002935 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2936 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2937 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2938 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2939 pydoc.)
2940
2941- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2942
2943- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002944
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002945Windows
2946-------
2947
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002948- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2949 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2950 time).
2951
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002952- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2953 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2954
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002955- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2956 release without strong cryptography.
2957
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002958- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002959 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002960
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002961- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2962 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2963
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002964Mac
2965---
2966
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002967- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2968 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002969
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002970- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2971 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2972 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002973
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002974- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2975 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002976
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002977- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2978 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2979 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2980 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002981
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002982- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002983 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2984 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2985 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002986
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002987
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002988What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002989=================================
2990
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002991*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002993Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002994--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002995
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002996- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2997
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002998- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2999 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003000 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003001 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003002 a different meaning than before.
3003
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003004- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003005 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003006 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003007
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003008- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003009 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003010 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003011
3012- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3013 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3014 and deallocation.
3015
3016- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3017 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3018
3019- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3020 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3021 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3022 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3023 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3024
3025- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3026 now detected by the garbage collector.
3027
3028- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3029 [SF bug 519621]
3030
3031- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3032 identifier.
3033
3034- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3035 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3036 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3037 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3038 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3039 [SF bug 563060]
3040
3041- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3042 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3043 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3044 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3045 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3046
3047- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3048 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3049 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3050
3051- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3052
3053- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3054 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3055 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3056 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3057 state of the slots would be lost.)
3058
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003059Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003060-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003061
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003062- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003063 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3064 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3065 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3066 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003067 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3068 Jython 2.1.
3069
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003070- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003071 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003072 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3073 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3074 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3075 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3076 these, see PEP 302.
3077
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003078- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3079 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3080 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3081
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003082- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3083 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3084 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3085
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003086- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3087 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3088 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3089
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003090- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3091 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3092 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3093 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3094 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3095 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3096 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3097 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3098 releases or implementations.
3099
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003100- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003101 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3102 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003103
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003104- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3105 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3106
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003107- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3108 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3109 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3110
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003111- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3112 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3113
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003114- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3115 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003116 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3117 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003118
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003119- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3120 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3121 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3122 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3123 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3124
3125 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3126 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3127 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3128 pattern.
3129
3130 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3131 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3132 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3133 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3134
3135 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3136 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3137 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3138 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3139 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3140 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3141
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003142- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3143 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3144 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3145 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3146 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3147 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3148 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3149 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003150
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003151- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3152 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3153 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3154 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3155 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003156 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3157 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3158 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3159 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3160 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3161 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3162 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003163
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003164- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3165 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3166
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003167- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3168 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3169 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3170 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3171 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3172 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3173 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3174 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3175 to Zack Weinberg!
3176
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003177- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3178 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3179 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3180 type. This has been fixed now.
3181
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003182- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3183 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3184 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3185
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003186- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3187 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3188 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3189 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3190 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3191 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3192 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3193 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003194 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003195
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003196- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3197 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3198 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003199
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003200- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3201 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3202 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3203 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3204 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3205 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3206 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3207 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003208 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003209 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3210 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3211
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003212- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3213 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3214 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3215 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3216 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3217 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3218 this.)
3219
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003220- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3221 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003222 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003223 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003224 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3225 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003226 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3227 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003228
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003229- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3230 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3231 currently running.
3232
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003233- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3234 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3235 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3236 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3237
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003238- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3239 as directory names.
3240
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003241- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3242 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3243
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003244- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3245 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3246
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003247- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003248 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3249 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003250
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003251- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3252 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3253 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3254 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3255 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3256
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003257- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3258 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3259 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3260 removed.
3261
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003262- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3263 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3264 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3265
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003266- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3267 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3268 to __debug__.
3269
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003270- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3271 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3272 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3273
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003274- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3275 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3276 deprecated now.
3277
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003278- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3279 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3280 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003281
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003282- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3283 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3284 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3285 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3286 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003287
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003288- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3289 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3290
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003291- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3292 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3293 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003294 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003295 is backward compatible.
3296
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003297- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3298 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3299 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3300 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3301 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3302
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003303- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3304 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3305 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3306 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3307 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3308 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003309
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003310- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3311 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3312
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003313- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3314 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3315
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003316- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3317 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3318 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3319 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3320 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3321
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003322- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3323 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3324 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3325
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003326- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003327 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3328
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003329- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3330 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3331 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003332
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003333- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3334 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3335
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003336- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3337 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3338 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3339
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003340- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3341
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003342Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003344
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003345- Added three operators to the operator module:
3346 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3347 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3348 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3349
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003350- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3351
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003352- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3353 archives.
3354
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003355- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3356 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3357 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3358
3359 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3360
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003361- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3362 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3363 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003364 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003365
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003366- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3367 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3368 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3369 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003370 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3371 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3372 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3373 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003374
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003375- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3376 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003377
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003378- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3379
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003380- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3381 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3382
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003383- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3384 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3385 supported.
3386
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003387- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3388
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003389- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3390 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003391
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003392- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3393 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3394
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003395- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3396
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003397- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3398 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3399
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003400- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3401 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3402 functions but callable type objects.
3403
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003404- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003405 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003406 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003407
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003408- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3409 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003410
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003411- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3412 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003413
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003414- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3415 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3416 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3417 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3418
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003419- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3420 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003421
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003422- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3423 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3424 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3425 and __imul__.
3426
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003427- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003428 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3429 is called.
3430
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003431- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3432 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3433 interpreter was compiled.
3434
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003435- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3436 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3437 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003438 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003439 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3440 1, not 2.
3441
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003442- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3443 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3444 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3445 limit.
3446
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003447- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3448 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3449 bug #623464.
3450
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003451- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3452 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3453 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3454 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3455
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003456Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003458
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003459- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3460
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003461- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3462 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3463 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3464 with Python 2.3a2.
3465
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003466- os.path exposes getctime.
3467
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003468- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003469 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003470 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003471 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003472 unit tests of floating point results.
3473
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003474- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3475 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3476 has been increased.
3477
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003478- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3479 executed.
3480
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003481- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3482 postinstallation script.
3483
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003484- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3485 test the current module.
3486
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003487- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003488 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3489 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3490 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3491 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3492
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003493- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003494 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003495 Ward's Optik package.
3496
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003497- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3498 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3499 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3500 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3501
3502- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3503 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003504 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003505
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003506- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3507 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3508 shelf are binary pickles.
3509
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003510- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3511 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3512
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003513- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3514 modules are iterators now.
3515
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003516- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3517 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3518 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3519 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3520 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3521 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003522
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003523- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3524 with their entity value.
3525
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003526- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3527
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003528- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3529 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003530
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003531- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3532 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003533 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003534
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003535- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3536 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3537 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3538 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3539 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3540 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3541 main():
3542
3543 import locale
3544 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3545
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003546- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3547 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3548
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003549- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3550 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3551 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3552 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3553 to the new standard.
3554
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003555- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3556 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3557 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3558 an extension to the database.
3559
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003560- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3561 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3562 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3563 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003564 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003565
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003566- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003567 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003568
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003569- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3570 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3571 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3572 bounded integers.
3573
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003574- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3575 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3576 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3577 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3578 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3579 in existence.
3580
3581 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3582 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3583 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3584 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3585 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3586 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3587
3588 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3589 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3590 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3591 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3592
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003593- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3594 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3595 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3596
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003597- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3598
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003599- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3600 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3601 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3602 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3603
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003604- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3605 argument.
3606
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003607- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3608 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3609 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3610 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3611 [SF patch 560794].
3612
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003613- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3614 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3615 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003616 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3617 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3618 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003619
3620- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3621 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003622
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003623- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3624 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3625 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3626 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003627
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003628- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3629 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3630 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3631 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3632 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3633
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003634- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003635
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003636- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3637
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003638- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3639 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3640 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3641 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3642 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3643 identical to None.
3644
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003645- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3646 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3647 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3648 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3649 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3650 results now.
3651
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003652- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3653 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3654
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003655- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3656 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3657 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3658 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3659 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3660 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3661 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3662 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3663
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003664- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3665
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003666- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3667 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3668
3669- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3670 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3671 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3672 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3673 and other systems.
3674
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003675- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3676 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3677 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3678 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 +00003679 work well with these.
3680
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003681- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3682
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003683- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003684 connections.
3685
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003686- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3687 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3688 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3689
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003690- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3691 sets
3692
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003693- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3694 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3695 name.
3696
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003697- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3698 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3699 passed in.
3700
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003701- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003702 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003703 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3704 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003705
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003706- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3707
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003708- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3709
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003710- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3711 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3712 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3713
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003714- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3715 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3716 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3717 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003718 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003719
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003720- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003721 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003722 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003723
3724- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3725 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3726 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3727
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003728- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003729 the value of its expression argument.
3730
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003731- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3732 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3733 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3734
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003735- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3736 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3737 skipstone browser was included.
3738
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003739- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3740 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3741
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003742Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003744
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003745- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3746 names in addition to accepting file names.
3747
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003748- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3749 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3750 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3751 still used and useful.)
3752
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003753- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3754 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3755 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3756 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003757
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003758- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3759 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3760 the generated binary.
3761
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003762Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003764
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003765- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3766
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003767- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3768 except in the hands of experts.
3769
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003770- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003771 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3772 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3773 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003774
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003775- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3776 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3777 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3778 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3779 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3780 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3781 builds.
3782
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003783- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3784 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3785 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3786 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3787 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3788 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3789 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3790 new type.
3791
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003792- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003793
3794 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3795 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3796 positive infinities.
3797
3798 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3799 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3800 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3801 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3802 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3803 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3804 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3805
3806 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3807
3808 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3809
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003810- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3811 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3812 size of the executable.
3813
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003814- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3815 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3816 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3817 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003818
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003819- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3820
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003821- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3822 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3823 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003824
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003825- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3826 well as Unix.
3827
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003828- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3829 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3830 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3831 modules in the README file for details.
3832
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003833C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003835
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003836- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3837 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003838 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003839 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003840 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003841
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003842- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3843 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3844 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3845 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3846 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3847 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003848 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003849 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3850 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3851 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3852 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3853 aligned.)
3854
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003855- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3856 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3857 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3858
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003859- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3860 level.
3861
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003862- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3863 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3864 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3865 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3866 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3867
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003868- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3869 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3870 code.
3871
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003872- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3873 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3874 adjusting for negative indices.
3875
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003876- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3877 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3878 object.
3879
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003880- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3881 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3882 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3883
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003884- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3885 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003886
3887- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3888
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003889- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3890 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3891 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3892 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3893
3894- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3895
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003896- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003897
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003898- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003899 without going through the buffer API.
3900
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003902
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003903- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3904 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3905 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3906 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3907
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003908- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3909 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3910
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003911- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003912 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3913
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003914New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003916
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003917- OpenVMS is now supported.
3918
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003919- AtheOS is now supported.
3920
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003921- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3922
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003923- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3924
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003925Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926-----
3927
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003928- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3929 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3930 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003931
3932Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003934
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003935- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3936 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3937 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3938 bugs.
3939 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003940 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003941 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3942 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003943 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003944
3945- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003946 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003947
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003948- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3949 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3950
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003951- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3952 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003953 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003954 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3955
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003956- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3957 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3958 use files" uninstall option).
3959
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003960- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3961
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003962- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3963 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3964
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003965- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3966 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3967 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3968
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003969- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3970 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3971 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3972 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3973 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003974 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3975 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3976 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003977
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003978- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003979 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003980 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3981 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3982 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3983 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3984 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3985 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3986 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3987 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3988 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3989 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3990 work around.
3991
3992- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3993 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3994 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3995 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3996 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3997 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3998 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3999 specified with O_CREAT too).
4000
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004001Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002----
4003
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004004- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004005
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004006- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4007 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4008 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4009
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004010- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4011 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4012 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4013
4014- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4015 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4016 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4017 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4018 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4019 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4020 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4021 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004022
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004023- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4024 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4025 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004026
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004027- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4028 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4029 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4030 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4031 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004032
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004033- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4034 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4035 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004036
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004037- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4038 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004039
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004040- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4041 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4042 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4043 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4044 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004045
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004046- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4047 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4048 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4049
4050- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4051 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4052 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004053
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004054- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4055 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4056 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4057 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004058 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004059
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004060- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4061 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004062
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004063- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4064 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004065
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004066- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004067 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004068 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4069 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004070
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004071
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004072What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073===============================
4074
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4076
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004077Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004080- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4081 with a custom metaclass.
4082
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004083Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004086- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4087 are proxies.
4088
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004089Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004091
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004092- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4093 very short strings.
4094
4095- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4096 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4097 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4098 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4099 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4100
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004101Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004103
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004104- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4105 close or delete time).
4106
4107- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4108 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4109
4110- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4111
4112- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004113 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004114
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004115Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004117
4118Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004120
4121C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004123
4124New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004126
4127Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004129
4130Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004131-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004132
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004133- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4134
4135- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4136 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4137
4138- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4139 deleted at process exit time.
4140
4141- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4142 in backslash.
4143
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004144Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004146
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004147- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4148 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4149 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4150
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004151
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004152What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153===========================
4154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4156
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004157Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004159
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004160- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4161 been extensively updated. See
4162
4163 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4164
4165 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4166
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004167- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4168 deleted!
4169
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004170- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4171 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4172 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4173 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4174 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4175
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004176- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4177
4178 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4179 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4180
4181 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4182 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4183 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4184 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4185 supported anyway.
4186
4187 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4188 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4189
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004190- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4191 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4192 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4193 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4194 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004195
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004196- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4197 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4198 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4199
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004200Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004202
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004203- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4204 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4205 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4206 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4207 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4208 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004209 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4210 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4211 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4212 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004213
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004214- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4215 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4216 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4217
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004218Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004220
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004221- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4222
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004223Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004225
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004226- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4227 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4228 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4229 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4230 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4231 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4232
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004233- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4234
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004235- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4236
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004237- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4238
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004239- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4240 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4241 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4242
4243- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4244
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004245Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004247
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004248- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4249 off a search on Google.
4250
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004251Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004253
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004254- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4255 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4256 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4257 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4258 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4259 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4260 other platforms should do likewise.
4261
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004262- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4263 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4264 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4265
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004266C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004268
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004269- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4270 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4271 producing key-value pairs.
4272
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004273- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004274 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004275 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4276 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4277 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4278 previously went unchallenged.
4279
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004280New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004282
4283Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004285
4286Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004288
4289Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004291
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004292- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4293 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004294
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004295- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4296 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4297 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4298 home.
4299
4300
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004301What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302===========================
4303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4305
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004306Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004308
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004309- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4310 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004311
4312 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004313 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004314
4315 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4316 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004317 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004318 This needs to be documented.
4319
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004320- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4321 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4322
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004323- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4324 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4325 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4326
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004327- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4328 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4329
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004330- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4331 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4332 class forbids it).
4333
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004334- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4335 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4336 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4337
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004338- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4339
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004340Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004342
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004343- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4344 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004345 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004346
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004347- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4348 (like 1 + '').
4349
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004350Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004352
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004353- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4354 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4355 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4356 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004357 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004358 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4359
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004360- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4361 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4362 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4363 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4364
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004365- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4366 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004367 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4368 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4369 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004370
4371- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4372 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004373
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004374- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4375 bytes on its input.
4376
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004377Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004379
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004380- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004381 convenience function.
4382
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004383- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4384 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4385 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004386 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4387 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4388 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4389 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4390 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4391 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004392
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004393- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4394 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4395 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4396 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4397
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004398- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4399 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4400 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4401
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004402- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4403 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4404 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4405 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4406
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004407- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4408 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004409 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004410 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4411 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4412 new -l and -e options.
4413
4414- statcache is now deprecated.
4415
4416- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4417 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004419 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4420 time properly taken into account.
4421
4422- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4423 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4424 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4425 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4426
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004427Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004429
4430Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004432
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004433- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4434 is built with libdb3 if available.
4435
4436- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4437
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004438C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004440
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004441- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4442 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4443 PySequence_Size().
4444
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004445- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4446
4447- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4448 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4449 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4450
4451- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4452 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4453
4454- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4455 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4456
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004457New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004459
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004460- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4461 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4462
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004463- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4464 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4465
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004466- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4467
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004468Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004471- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4472 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4473
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004474Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004476
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004477Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004479
4480- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4481 removed completely in the next release.
4482
4483- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4484 OSX.
4485
4486- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4487 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4488
4489- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4490
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004491
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004492What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004493===========================
4494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4496
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004497Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004499
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004500- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004501 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004502 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004503 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4504 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004505 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4506 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004507 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4508 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004509
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004510- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4511 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4512
4513- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4514 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4515
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004516Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004518
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004519- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4520 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4521 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4522 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4523 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4524 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4525 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4526 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4527
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004528- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4529 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4530 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4531 example).
4532
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004533- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004534 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004535 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004536 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004537
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004538- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4539 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4540 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004541 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004542
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004543- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4544 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4545 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4546 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4547 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4548 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4549
4550 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4551
4552 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4553
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004554Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004556
4557- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4558
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004559- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4560
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004561- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4562 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004563
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004564- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4565 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4566 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4567 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4568 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4569 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004570 attributes.
4571
4572- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4573 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4574 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004575
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004576- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4577 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4578 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004579
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004580- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4581 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4582 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004583 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4584 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4585
4586- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4587 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004588
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004589Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004591
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004592- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4593 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4594
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004595- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4596 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4597 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4598 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4599
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004600- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4601 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4602 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4603 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4604
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004605 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4606 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4607 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4608 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4609 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4610 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4611 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4612 without losing information).
4613
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004614- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004615 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4616 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4617 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4618 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4619 module).
4620
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004621 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004622 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4623 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4624 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4625 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004626
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004627- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004628 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4629 encoding.
4630
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004631- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4632 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4633
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004635 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4636
4637- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4638 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4639 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4640 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4641
4642- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4643
4644- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4645 ON, and OFF.
4646
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004647- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4648 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4649
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004650Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004652
4653- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4654 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4655 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004656
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004657- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4658 been added: -X and -E.
4659
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004662
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004663- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4664 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4665
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004666C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004668
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004669- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4670 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4671 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4672 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4673 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4674
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004675- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4676 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4677 as long) arguments.
4678
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004679- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4680 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4681 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4682 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4683 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4684 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4685
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004686- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4687 input.
4688
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004689New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004691
4692Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004694
4695Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004697
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004698- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4699 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4700 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4701
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004702- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4703 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4704 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004705 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004706
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4708 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4709 import signal
4710 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004711
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004713 while 1:
4714 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004716 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4717 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4718 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4719 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004720
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004721
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004722What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4723===========================
4724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4726
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004727Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004729
4730- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4731 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4732 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4733
4734- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4735 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4736 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4737 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4738 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4739 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4740 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004741
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004742- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004743 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004744 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4745 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4746 associate a docstring with a property.
4747
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004748- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4749 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4750 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4751 other built-in object types.
4752
4753- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4754 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4755 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4756 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4757 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4758
4759- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4760 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4761
4762- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4763 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004764 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004765 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4766 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4767 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4768 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4769 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4770
4771- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4772 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4773 class.
4774
4775- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4776 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4777 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4778 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4779
4780- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4781 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4782 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4783 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4784
4785- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4786 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4787
4788- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4789 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4790 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4791 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4792 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004793 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004794 with the same value as s.
4795
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004796- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4797
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004798Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004800
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004801- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4802
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004803- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4804 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4805 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4806 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4807 objects.
4808
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004809- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4810 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004811 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4812 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4813
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004814- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4815 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4816 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4817
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004818Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004820
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004821- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4822 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4823 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4824 by the instances.
4825
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004826- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4827 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4828 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4829
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004830- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4831 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4832 before the entire comparison is complete.
4833
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004834- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4835 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4836 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4837
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004838- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4839 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4840 getwriter().
4841
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004842- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4843 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4844
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004845- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004846 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4847 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4848
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004849- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4850 iterable object.
4851
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004852- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4853 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004854
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004855- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4856 authentication.
4857
4858- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4859 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004860
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004861- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004862 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4863 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4864 a sample driver.)
4865
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004866Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004868
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004869- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4870 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4871 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4872 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4873 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4874 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4875 kernel has large file support.
4876
4877- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4878 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4879 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4880 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4881 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4882
4883- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4884 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4885 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4886
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004887C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004889
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004890- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4891 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4892
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004893New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004895
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004896- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4897 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4898
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004899Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004901
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004902- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4903 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4904 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4905 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4906 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4907
4908- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4909 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4910 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4911 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4912
4913- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4914 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4915
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004916Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004918
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004919- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004920 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4921 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004922
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004923
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004924What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4925===========================
4926
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4928
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004929Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004931
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004932- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4933 big to represent as a C double.
4934
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004935- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4936 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4937 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4938 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4939 restriction).
4940
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004941- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4942 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4943 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4944 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4945 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4946
4947 >>> dir([])
4948 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4949 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4950 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4951 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4952 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4953 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4954 'reverse', 'sort']
4955
4956 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4957
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004958- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004959 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4960 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4961 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4962 OverflowError exception.
4963
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004964- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004965 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004966 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4967 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4968 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4969 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4970 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004971 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4973 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4974
4975 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4976 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4977 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4978 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004979
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004980- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004981 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4982 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4983 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4984 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4985 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4986 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4987 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4988 once it is created.
4989
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004990- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4991 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4992 (key, value) pairs.
4993
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004994- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004995 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4996 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4997
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004998- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4999 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5000 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5001 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5002 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005003
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005004- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005005 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5006 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5007
5008 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5009
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005010- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005011 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5012
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005013Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005015
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005016- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005017 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5018 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005019
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005020- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5021 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5022 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5023 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5024 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5025 in this area anymore).
5026
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005027- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5028 threading.Timer.
5029
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005030- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5031 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5032
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005033- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005034 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5035
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005036- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005037 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5038 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5039 converted to Python longs.
5040
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005041- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005042 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5043
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005044- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5045 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5046 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5047
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005048Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005050
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005051- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5052 division operators as per PEP 238.
5053
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005054Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005055-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005056
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005057- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5058 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5059 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5060 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5061
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005062C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005064
5065- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005066
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005067- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5068 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005069 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5072 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005073 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005075
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005076- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005077 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5078 module:
5079
5080 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005081
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005082 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5083 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005084
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005085 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5086 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005087
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005088 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5089
5090 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5091
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005092- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005093 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5094 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5095 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005096
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005097New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005099
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005100- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5101 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5102 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5103 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5104 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005105
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005106Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005108
5109Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005111
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005112- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5113 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5114 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5115 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005116 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5117 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5118 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5119 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5120 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005121
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005122- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005123 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5124
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005125
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005126What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5127===========================
5128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5130
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005131Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005133
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005134- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5135 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5136
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005137- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5138 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5139 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005140
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005141- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5142 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5143 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5144 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005145
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005146- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5147
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005149
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005150Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005152
5153- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005154 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005155 the module docstring for details.
5156
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005157Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005159
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005160- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005161 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5162 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5163 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005164
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005165- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5166 Nick Mathewson.
5167
5168Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005170
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005171- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5172 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5173 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5174 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5175 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5176 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5177 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5178 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5179
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005180- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5181 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5182 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5183 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5184
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005185- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5186 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5187 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5188 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5189 come a long way).
5190
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005191- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5192 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5193 write filters for these warnings).
5194
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005195- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5196 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5197 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5198 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5199 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5200
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005201- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5202 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5203 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5204 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5205 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5206 older distribution.
5207
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005208Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005210
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005211- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5212 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005213 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005214
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005215- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5216 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5217 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5218
5219- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5220
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005221- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5222
5223- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5224
5225- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5226
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005228
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005229- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5230
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005231New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005233
5234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005236
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005237- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5238 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5239 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5240 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5241 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5242 against buffer overruns.
5243
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005244- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005245 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5246 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005247 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5248 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5249 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5250
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005251- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5252 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5253 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5254 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5255 deprecated.
5256
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005257Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005259
5260- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5261 relevant is found.
5262
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005263
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005264What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005265===========================
5266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5268
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005269Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005271
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005272- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5273 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5274 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5275 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5276 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5277 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5278 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5279 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005280 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005281 repaired.
5282
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005283- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005284 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005285 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5286 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5287 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5288 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5289 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5290 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5291 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5292 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5293
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005294- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5295 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5296 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5297 leading BMO character).
5298
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005299- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5300 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5301 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5302
5303 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5304 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5305 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005306
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005307 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5308 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5309 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5310 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5311 for various simple to use conversions.
5312
5313 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5314 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5315
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005316 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5317 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5318 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5319 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5320 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5321 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5322 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5323 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5324 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5325 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5326 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5327 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5328 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5329 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5330 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005331
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005332- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5333 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5334 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005335 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005336 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005337
5338 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005339 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5340 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5341 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5342 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5343 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005344 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5345 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005346
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005347 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5348 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5349 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005350 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005351
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005352- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5353 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5354 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5355 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5356 floating arithmetic,
5357
5358 x = 9007199254740992.0
5359 print long(x)
5360
5361 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5362 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5363 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5364 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5365 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5366 functions are of good quality).
5367
5368 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5369 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5370 algorithms to break.
5371
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005372- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5373 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5374 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5375 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5376 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5377 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5378 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5379 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5380 order.
5381
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005382- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5383 operation along the most common code paths.
5384
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005385- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5386 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5387
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005388- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5389 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5390 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5391 {}.update(UserDict())
5392
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005393- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5394 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5395 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5396 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5397 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5398 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5399 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5400 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5401
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005402- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005403 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005404
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005405 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005406 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5407 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005408 join() method of strings
5409 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005410 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5411 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005412 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005413 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005414
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005415- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5416 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5417
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005418- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5419 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5420
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005421- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5422 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5423 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5424 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5425
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005426- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5427 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005428 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005429 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5430 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005431
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005432- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5433
5434
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005435Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005437
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005438- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005439 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005440 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5441 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5442
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005443- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5444 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5445
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005446- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5447 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5448 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5449 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5450
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005451- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5452 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5453 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5454
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005455- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5456
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005457- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5458
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005459- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5460 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5461 that are still imported into string.py).
5462
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005463- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5464
5465- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5466 Now it does.
5467
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005468- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5469
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005470- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5471 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5472 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5473 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5474 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005475 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5476 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005477
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005478- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5479 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5480 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5481 'help(object)'.
5482
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005483Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005485
5486- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005487 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005488 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5489 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5490
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005491- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005492 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5493 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005494
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005495C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005496-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005497
5498- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5499 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005500
5501----
5502
5503**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**