blob: 63c89d236bdd73580078f85be8d8a66b3317522c [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
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20
21Library
22-------
23
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000024- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
25
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000026- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
27 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
28 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
29
Raymond Hettinger784ab762004-12-04 10:50:51 +000030- the deprecated whrandom module was removed. Use the random module instead.
31
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000032- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000033 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034
35
36Build
37-----
38
39
40C API
41-----
42
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000043- Removed PyRange_New().
44
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000045
46Tests
47-----
48
49
50Mac
51---
52
53
54
55Tools/Demos
56-----------
57
58
59
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000060What's New in Python 2.4 final?
61===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000062
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000063*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000064
65Core and builtins
66-----------------
67
68- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
69 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
70 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
71
72
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +000073What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
74==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000075
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +000076*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000077
78Core and builtins
79-----------------
80
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +000081- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
82 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
83 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
84
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000085
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000086Library
87-------
88
89- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
90 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
91 raised is re-raised.
92
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +000093- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
94 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
95
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +000096- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
97 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
98 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
99 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
100 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
101 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
102 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
103 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
104 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
105 by the slice are recomputed now.
106
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000107- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000108
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000109Build
110-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000111
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000112- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
113 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
114 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000115
116C API
117-----
118
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000119- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
120
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000121
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000122What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
123================================
124
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000125*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000126
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000127License
128-------
129
130The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
131is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
132changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
133Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
134intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
135durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
136the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
137License::
138
139 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
140
141says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
142to Python 2.1.1.
143
144The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
145License Version 2.
146
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000147Core and builtins
148-----------------
149
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000150- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
151 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
152 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
153 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
154 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
155 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
156 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
157 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
158 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
159 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
160
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000161- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000162
163Extension Modules
164-----------------
165
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000166- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
167 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
168 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
169 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000170
171Library
172-------
173
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000174- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
175 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
176 returned.
177
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000178- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
179
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000180- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
181 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
182
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000183- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
184
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000185- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
186 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000187
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000188- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
189
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000190- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
191
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000192- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000193 the source code is updated and reloaded.
194
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000195Build
196-----
197
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000198- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000199
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000200What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
201================================
202
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000203*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000204
205Core and builtins
206-----------------
207
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000208- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000209 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
210
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000211- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
212 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
213 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
214 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
215
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000216- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
217 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
218
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000219- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
220 constant.
221
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000222- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
223 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
224 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
225 large), and to anomalies such as
226 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
227 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
228 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
229 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000230
231Extension modules
232-----------------
233
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000234- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
235 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000236 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
237 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
238 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000239
240Library
241-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000242
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000243- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000244 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000245 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
246 --swig-cpp.
247
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000248- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
249 it is set.
250
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000251- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000252
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000253- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
254 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
255 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
256 Closes bug #1039270.
257
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000258- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000259
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000260 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000261 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
262 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
263 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
264 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
265 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
266 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
267 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
268 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
269 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
270 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
271 + Updates to documentation.
272
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000273- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
274 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
275 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
276 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
277
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000278- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000279
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000280- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
281 applications should use the getmember function.
282
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000283- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
284
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000285- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
286 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
287 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
288 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
289 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
290 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
291 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
292 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
293 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
294
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000295- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
296 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000297 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000298
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000299- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
300 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
301 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
302 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
303 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
304 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
305 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
306 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000307
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000308- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
309 the new public features (of which there are many).
310
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000311- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000312 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
313 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
314 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
315 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000316 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000317
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000318- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
319
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000320- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
321 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
322 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
323 options.
324
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000325- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
326 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
327 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
328 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
329 conditions under which non-string values work.
330
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000331Build
332-----
333
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000334- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
335 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
336 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
337
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000338- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
339 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
340 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
341 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
342 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000343
344C API
345-----
346
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000347- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
348 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
349
350- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
351
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000352- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
353 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
354 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
355 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
356 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
357 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
358 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
359 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
360 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
361
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000362- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
363
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000364- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
365 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
366 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000367
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000368Tests
369-----
370
371- test__locale ported to unittest
372
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000373Mac
374---
375
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000376- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
377 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
378 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000379
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000380Tools/Demos
381-----------
382
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000383- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
384 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
385 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
386 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
387 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000388
389
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000390What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
391=================================
392
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000393*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000394
395Core and builtins
396-----------------
397
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000398- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000399 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
400
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000401- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
402 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
403 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
404 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
405 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
406 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
407 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
408 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000409 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
410 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
411 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
412 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
413 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000414
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000415- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
416 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
417 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
418 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
419 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
420
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000421- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
422
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000423- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
424 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
425
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000426- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
427 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
428 modified the list.
429
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000430- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
431 functions is now writable.
432
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000433- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
434 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
435 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
436 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
437
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000438- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
439 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
440 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
441 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
442 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000443
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000444- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
445 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
446
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000447Extension modules
448-----------------
449
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000450- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
451
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000452- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
453 data.
454
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000455- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
456 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
457 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
458 supposed to have been truncated away.
459
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000460- Added socket.socketpair().
461
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000462- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
463 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
464
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000465- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000466 versions of Python, have now been removed.
467
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000468Library
469-------
470
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000471- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000472 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000473
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000474- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
475 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
476
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000477- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
478 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
479
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000480- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
481
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000482- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
483 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000484
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000485- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
486 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
487
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000488- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
489
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000490- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
491
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000492- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
493
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000494- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
495 Percivall.
496
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000497- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
498 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
499
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000500- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
501 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
502 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000503 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000504
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000505- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
506 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
507 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
508 and exponent.
509
510- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
511
512- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
513 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
514 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
515
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000516- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
517 to the readline module.
518
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000519- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000520 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
521 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000522
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000523- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
524 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
525 contains symlinks.
526
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000527- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
528 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
529
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000530- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
531 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
532 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
533
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000534- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
535 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
536 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
537 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
538 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
539 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
540 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
541 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
542 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
543 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
544 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
545 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
546 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
547
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000548- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
549
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000550Tools/Demos
551-----------
552
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000553- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
554 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
555
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000556- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
557
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000558Build
559-----
560
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000561- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
562 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
563 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
564 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
565 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
566 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
567 plans to do so.
568
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000569- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
570 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
571
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000572- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
573 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
574
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000575- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
576 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
577
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000578- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
579 GNU/k*BSD systems.
580
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000581- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
582 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
583
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000584C API
585-----
586
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000587..
588
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000589Documentation
590-------------
591
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000592- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
593 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
594
595- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
596 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
597 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000598
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000599New platforms
600-------------
601
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000602- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
603
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000604Tests
605-----
606
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000607..
608
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000609Windows
610-------
611
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000612- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
613 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
614 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
615 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
616 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
617 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
618 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
619 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
620 the problem.
621
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000622Mac
623---
624
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000625..
626
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000627
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000628What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
629=================================
630
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000631*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000632
633Core and builtins
634-----------------
635
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000636- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
637 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
638 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
639 sensitive code.
640
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000641- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000642 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000643
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000644 @staticmethod
645 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000646
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000647 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000648
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000649- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
650 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
651 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
652 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
653 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
654 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
655 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
656 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
657 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
658 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
659 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
660
661 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
662 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
663 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
664 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
665 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
666 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
667 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
668
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000669- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
670 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
671
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000672- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000673 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000674
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000675- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000676 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000677 which was missing for no apparent reason.
678
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000679- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000680 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
681 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
682
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000683- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
684 types that support garbage collection.
685
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000686- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
687
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000688- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
689 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
690 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
691 Jython.
692
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000693- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
694
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000695- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
696 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
697
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000698- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
699 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
700 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000701
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000702- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
703 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
704 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
705
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000706Extension modules
707-----------------
708
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000709- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
710
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000711Library
712-------
713
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000714- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
715 TIS-620
716
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000717- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
718 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
719 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
720 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
721 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
722 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
723 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
724 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
725 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
726 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
727
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000728- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
729
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000730- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
731 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
732 same as when the argument is omitted).
733 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
734
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000735- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
736
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000737- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
738 schemes are offered.
739
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000740- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
741
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000742- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
743 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
744 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
745
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000746- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
747
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000748- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
749 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
750
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000751- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
752 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
753 when dummy_threading is being used.
754
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000755- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
756 from a tarfile.
757
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000758- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000759 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000760
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000761- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
762 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
763 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
764 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
765
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000766- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
767 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
768
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000769- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
770 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
771 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
772 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
773 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
774 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
775 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
776 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
777 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
778 by some other method in progress).
779
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000780- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
781 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
782 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000783
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000784- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
785
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000786- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
787 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
788 AM Kuchling.
789
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000790- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
791 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
792 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
793
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000794- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
795 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
796 instead of unsigned.
797
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000798- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000799 no longer part of the public API.
800
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000801- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
802 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
803 string methods of the same name).
804
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000805- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000806 SF patch 945642.
807
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000808- doctest unittest integration improvements:
809
810 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
811
812 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
813 DocTestSuites.
814
815- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
816 that provide thread-local data.
817
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000818- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
819 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
820
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000821- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
822
823- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
824 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
825 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
826
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000827- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
828
829 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
830 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
831 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000832
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000833 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
834 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
835 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
836 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
837
838 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
839 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
840
841 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
842 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
843 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
844 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
845
846 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
847 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
848 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
849 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
850 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
851
852 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
853 wrapping help output.
854
855 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
856 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
857 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000858
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000859C API
860-----
861
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000862- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
863 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
864 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
865 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
866 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
867 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
868 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
869 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
870 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
871 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
872 its visible semantics have not changed.
873
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000874- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
875 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
876
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000877Documentation
878-------------
879
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000880- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000881
882 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000883 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000884
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000885 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000886
887 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
888
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000889- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000890
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000891Tests
892-----
893
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000894- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000895 platforms that use the Makefile.
896
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000897- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
898 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
899 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
900
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000901
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000902What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
903=================================
904
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000905*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000906
907Core and builtins
908-----------------
909
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000910- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
911 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
912 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
913 objects now (one object instead of three).
914
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000915- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
916 Windows DLLs.
917
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000918- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
919 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000920
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000921- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
922 a new .pyc magic.
923
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000924- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
925 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
926 be there.
927
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000928- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
929 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
930 the LC_NUMERIC category.
931
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000932- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
933 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
934 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
935
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000936- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
937
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000938- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
939 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
940 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000941
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000942- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
943 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
944
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000945- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
946
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000947- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000948 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000949
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000950- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
951
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000952- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
953
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000954- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
955 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
956
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000957- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
958 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
959 Fixes bug #858016 .
960
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000961- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
962 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
963 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
964
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000965- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
966 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
967 improves their performance (about 35%).
968
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000969- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
970 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
971 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
972
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000973- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
974 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
975 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
976 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
977
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000978- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
979 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
980 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
981 length is not known).
982
983- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
984 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000985 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
986 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000987 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
988
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000989- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
990 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
991
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000992- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
993 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
994 keyword arguments.
995
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000996- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
997 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
998 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
999
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001000- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1001 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1002 cases.
1003
1004- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1005 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1006 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1007 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1008 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1009 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1010 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1011 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1012 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1013 a release build.
1014
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001015- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1016 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1017
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001018- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001019 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001020
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001021- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1022 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1023 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1024 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1025 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1026 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1027 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1028 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1029 destroyed.
1030
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001031- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1032 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1033 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1034 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1035 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1036 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1037 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1038 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1039
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001040- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1041 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1042 character other than a space.
1043
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001044- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1045 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1046 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1047 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1048 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1049 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1050 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1051 attributes with the same name.
1052
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001053- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1054 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1055 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1056 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1057 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1058 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1059 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1060 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1061 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1062 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1063 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1064 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1065 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1066 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001067
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001068- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1069 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1070 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1071 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1072 This has been repaired.
1073
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001074- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1075
1076- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1077
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001078- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1079 over a sequence.
1080
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001081- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001082 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001083
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001084- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1085
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001086- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1087 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1088 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1089 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1090 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1091 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1092 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1093 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1094
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001095- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1096 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1097 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1098
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001099- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1100 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1101 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1102 freelist.
1103
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001104- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1105 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1106
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001107- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1108 number.
1109
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001110- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1111 a TypeError exception.
1112
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001113- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1114 820195.
1115
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001116- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1117 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1118 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1119
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001120- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001121 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1122 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001123
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001124- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1125 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1126 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1127
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001128- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1129 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001130 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001131
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001132- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001133 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1134 the first call.
1135
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001136
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001137Extension modules
1138-----------------
1139
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001140- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1141 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1142
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001143- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1144 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1145 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1146 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1147 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1148 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1149 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001150
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001151- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1152
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001153- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1154
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001155- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1156 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1157
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001158- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1159 fewer false positives.
1160
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001161- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1162 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1163
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001164- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001165 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1166
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001167- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001168 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001169 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001170 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1171 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001172
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001173- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1174 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1175 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1176 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1177
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001178- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1179 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1180 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1181 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1182 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1183 #897625.
1184
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001185- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1186 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1187
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001188- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1189 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1190 and pops on either side of the deque.
1191
1192- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1193 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1194
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001195- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1196 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1197 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1198 other functions that expect a function argument.
1199
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001200- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1201
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001202- os.getsid was added.
1203
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001204- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1205 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1206 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1207
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001208- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1209
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001210- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1211
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001212- readline.clear_history was added.
1213
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001214- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1215
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001216- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1217
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001218- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1219
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001220- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1221
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001222- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1223
1224- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1225
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001226- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1227
1228- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1229
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001230- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1231 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1232 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1233
1234- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1235 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1236 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1237 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1238 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1239 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1240 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1241
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001242- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1243 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1244 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1245 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001246
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001247- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001248 iterators from a single iterable.
1249
1250- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1251 of raising a TypeError exception.
1252
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001253- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1254 as parameter.
1255
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001256Library
1257-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001258
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001259- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1260 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1261 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001262
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001263- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1264 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1265 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001266
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001267- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001268
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001269- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1270 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001271
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001272- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1273 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1274
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001275- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1276
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001277- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001278 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001279
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001280- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001281 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001282
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001283- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1284
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001285- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1286 on cygwin and mingw32.
1287
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001288- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1289
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001290- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1291 module.
1292
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001293- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1294 installation scheme for all platforms.
1295
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001296- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001297 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001298
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001299- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1300 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1301 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1302
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001303- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1304 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1305 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1306
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001307- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1308
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001309- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1310
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001311- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1312 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1313
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001314- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1315 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1316 type pattern with the same value exists.
1317
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001318- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1319 when run from the command prompt).
1320
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001321- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1322 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1323
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001324- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1325 default sort).
1326
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001327- Added global runctx function to profile module
1328
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001329- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1330
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001331- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1332
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001333- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1334
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001335- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001336 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1337 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1338 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1339 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1340 accordingly.
1341
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001342- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1343 decoding standards.
1344
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001345- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1346 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1347 called for all requests.
1348
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001349- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1350 they are passed to the compiler.
1351
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001352- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1353 indent, width and depth.
1354
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001355- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1356 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1357
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001358- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1359 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1360
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001361- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1362
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001363- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1364
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001365- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1366
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001367- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1368 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1369
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001370- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001371 for better performance.
1372
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001373- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001374
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001375- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1376 a string).
1377
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001378- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1379
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001380- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1381
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001382- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1383
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001384- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1385
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001386- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1387 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1388 list of fieldnames.
1389
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001390- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1391 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1392
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001393- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1394
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001395- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1396 empty lists.
1397
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001398- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1399 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1400 and shelves.
1401
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001402- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1403 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1404
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001405- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001406 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1407 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001408
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001409- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1410 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001411 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001412
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001413- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001414 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1415 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1416
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001417- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1418 and removed in Py2.4.
1419
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001420- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1421
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001422- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1423
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001424Tools/Demos
1425-----------
1426
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001427- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1428 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1429
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001430- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1431
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001432- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1433 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1434 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1435 destination in situations where both files are given.
1436
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001437- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1438 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1439 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1440 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1441
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001442- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1443
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001444- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1445 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1446 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1447 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1448 now.
1449
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001450- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1451 in effect
1452
1453- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1454 C-c C-h
1455
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001456- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1457 -d option was given.
1458
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001459Build
1460-----
1461
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001462- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1463 build under OS X.
1464
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001465- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1466 --enable-profiling.
1467
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001468- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1469 is configured --with-tsc.
1470
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001471- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1472 on AMD64.
1473
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001474- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1475 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1476
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001477- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1478 removed.
1479
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001480- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1481 supported (see PEP 11).
1482
1483- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1484
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001485- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1486
1487- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1488 (see PEP 11).
1489
1490- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1491 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1492
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001493C API
1494-----
1495
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001496- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1497 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1498 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1499
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001500- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1501 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1502 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1503 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1504
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001505- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1506 generator objects.
1507
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001508- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1509 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001510 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1511 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001512
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001513- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1514 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1515
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001516- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1517 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1518 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1519 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1520 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1521
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001522- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1523 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1524 about 10% faster.
1525
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001526- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1527 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1528
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001529- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1530 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1531 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1532 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1533
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001534Windows
1535-------
1536
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001537- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1538 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1539 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1540 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1541
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001542- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1543 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1544 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1545
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001546
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001547What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1548===============================
1549
1550*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1551
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001552IDLE
1553----
1554
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001555- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1556 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1557 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1558 context-menu actions.
1559
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001560- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1561 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1562 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1563 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1564 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1565 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1566 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1567 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1568 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1569
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001570
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001571What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1572=============================================
1573
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001574*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001575
1576Core and builtins
1577-----------------
1578
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001579- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001580 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001581 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1582
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001583Extension modules
1584-----------------
1585
1586- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1587 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1588 than once. This has been fixed.
1589
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001590- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1591 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1592 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1593 call.
1594
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001595- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1596
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001597Library
1598-------
1599
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001600- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1601 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1602
1603- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1604 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1605 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1606 restored.
1607
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001608IDLE
1609----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001610
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001611- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001612
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001613Build
1614-----
1615
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001616- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1617 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1618
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001619C API
1620-----
1621
1622Windows
1623-------
1624
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001625- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1626 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1627
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001628- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1629
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001630Mac
1631---
1632
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001633- Various fixes to pimp.
1634
1635- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1636
1637- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1638 more problems than it solves.
1639
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001640
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001641What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1642=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001643
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001644*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1645
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001646Core and builtins
1647-----------------
1648
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001649- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1650 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1651
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001652- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1653 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001654 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001655
1656- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1657 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1658 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001659 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001660
1661- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1662 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001663
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001664- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1665 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1666 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1667
1668- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001669 770247.
1670
1671- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001672
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001673Extension modules
1674-----------------
1675
1676- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1677 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1678
1679- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1680
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001681- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1682
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001683- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1684 contained within the _strptime module.
1685
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001686- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1687 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1688
1689- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001690 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1691
1692- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1693 the find_class attribute, if present.
1694
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001695- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001696
1697 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1698 (SF bug 763298).
1699
1700 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001701 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1702 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1703 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001704
1705 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1706
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001707Library
1708-------
1709
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001710- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1711
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001712- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1713 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1714 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1715 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1716 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1717 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1718 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1719 or Tester().
1720
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001721- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1722 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1723 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1724 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1725 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1726 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1727 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1728 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1729 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001730
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001731 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001732
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001733- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1734 weren't before was an oversight.
1735
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001736- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1737 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1738
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001739- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1740 when there are no lines.
1741
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001742- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1743 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1744
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001745- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1746 to child processes.
1747
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001748- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1749
1750- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1751
1752- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1753 xmlrpclib.
1754
1755- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1756 responses.
1757
1758- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1759 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1760
1761- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1762 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1763 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1764
1765- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1766 used as patterns.
1767
1768- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1769 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1770 than Tk 8.3.
1771
1772- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1773
1774- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001775
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001776Tools/Demos
1777-----------
1778
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001779- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1780
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001781- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1782
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001783- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001784
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001785Build
1786-----
1787
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001788- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1789
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001790- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1791
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001792- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1793 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001795- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1796 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1797 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001798
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001799C API
1800-----
1801
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001802- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1803 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1804
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001805Windows
1806-------
1807
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001808- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1809 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1810 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1811 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1812 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1813 Python exception ::
1814
1815 thread.error: can't start new thread
1816
1817 is raised now.
1818
1819- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1820 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1821 instead of from DLL teardown.
1822
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001823Mac
1824---
1825
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001826- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001827 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001828 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1829 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1830 the executable in the bundle.
1831
1832- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001833
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001834- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1835
1836- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1837 on Panther.
1838
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001839What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1840================================
1841
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001842*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001843
1844Core and builtins
1845-----------------
1846
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001847- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1848 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1849 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1850 with the -i option.
1851
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001852- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1853 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1854
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001855- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1856 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1857
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001858- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1859 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1860 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1861 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1862 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1863 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1864 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1865 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1866 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1867 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1868 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1869 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1870 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001871
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001872- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1873 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1874 embedded in a lambda expression.
1875
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001876- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1877 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1878 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1879 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1880 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1881
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001882- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1883 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1884 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1885
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001886- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1887 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1888
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001889- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1890 It's writable again.
1891
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001892- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1893 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1894 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001895 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001896
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001897- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1898 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1899 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1900
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001901Extension modules
1902-----------------
1903
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001904- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1905 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1906
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001907- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1908 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1909 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1910 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1911
1912- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1913 collection.
1914
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001915- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1916 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1917 unique within a single program run.
1918
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001919- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1920 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1921
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001922- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1923 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1924
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001925- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1926 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001927
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001928- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1929
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001930- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1931 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1932
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001933- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1934 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1935 for many BSD-derived systems.
1936
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001937
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001938Library
1939-------
1940
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001941- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1942 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1943 primary ones:
1944
1945 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1946 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1947 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1948
1949 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1950 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1951 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1952 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1953 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1954 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1955
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001956- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1957 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1958 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1959 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1960 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1961 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1962 argument.
1963
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001964- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1965 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1966 in the archive.
1967
1968- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1969 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1970
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001971- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1972 569574).
1973
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001974- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1975 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1976 no more.
1977
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001978- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1979 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1980 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1981 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1982 code coverage.
1983
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001984- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1985 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1986 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001987 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1988 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001989
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001990- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1991 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1992 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001993 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001994
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001995- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1996
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001997- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1998 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1999 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2000 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2001
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002002- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2003 handling.
2004
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002005- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2006 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2007
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002008- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2009 in socket.py.
2010
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002011- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2012
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002013- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2014 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2015 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2016 opener with proxy support.
2017
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002018- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2019
2020- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2021
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002022Tools/Demos
2023-----------
2024
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002025- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2026
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002027- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2028
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002029- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2030 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002031
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002032- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2033 files.
2034
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002035Build
2036-----
2037
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002038- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002039 different root directory.
2040
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002041C API
2042-----
2043
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002044- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2045 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2046 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2047 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2048 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2049 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2050 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2051 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2052 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2053 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2054
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002055- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2056 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2057 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2058 from Python.
2059
2060
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002061New platforms
2062-------------
2063
2064None this time.
2065
2066Tests
2067-----
2068
2069- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2070 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2071
2072Windows
2073-------
2074
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002075- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2076
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002077- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2078 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2079 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2080 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2081 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2082 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2083 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2084 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2085 that's what it's for.
2086
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002087Mac
2088---
2089
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002090- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2091 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2092 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2093 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002094- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2095 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2096- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002097
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002098SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2099------------------------------------
2100
2101430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2102598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2103622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2104661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2105683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2106697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2107713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2108724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2109727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2110729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2111730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2112731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2113732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2114733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2115735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2116740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2117744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2118745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2119747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2120749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2121751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2122753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2123755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2124757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2125760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2126
2127
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002128What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2129================================
2130
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002131*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002132
2133Core and builtins
2134-----------------
2135
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002136- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2137 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2138
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002139- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2140 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2141 and cannot be strings).
2142
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002143- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2144 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2145 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2146 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2147
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002148- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2149 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2150 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2151 Python itself.
2152
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002153- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2154 the referenced object, if it has one.
2155
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002156- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2157 the thread started at
2158 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2159
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002160- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2161 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2162 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2163 placed on a list index.
2164
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002165- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2166 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2167 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2168 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2169
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002170- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2171 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2172 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2173 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2174 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2175 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2176 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2177
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002178- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2179 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2180 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2181 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2182 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2183
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002184- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2185 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002186
2187- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2188 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2189 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2190 #693195.)
2191
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002192- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2193 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002194
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002195- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002196 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002197 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2198 interpreter executions, would fail.
2199
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002200- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002201 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002202 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002203
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002204Extension modules
2205-----------------
2206
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002207- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2208 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2209 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2210 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2211
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002212- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2213 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2214
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002215- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2216 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2217 and Greg Chapman.)
2218
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002219- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2220 recursively.
2221
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002222- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002223 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2224 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2225 leaks.
2226
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002227- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2228
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002229- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2230 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2231 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2232 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2233 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2234 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2235 #705836.
2236
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002237- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002238 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2239
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002240- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2241 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2242 See SF bug #692416.
2243
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002244- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2245 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2246
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002247- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2248 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2249 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002250
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002251- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002252 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2253 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2254
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002255- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2256 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2257 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2258 timeouts to work properly.
2259
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002260Library
2261-------
2262
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002263- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2264 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2265 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2266 future release.
2267
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002268- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2269 for querying platform dependent features.
2270
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002271- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002272
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002273- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2274 pickle protocol versions.
2275
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002276- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2277 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2278 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2279
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002280- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2281
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002282- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2283 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2284 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2285 modules.
2286
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002287- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2288 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2289 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2290
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002291- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2292 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2293
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002294- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2295 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2296 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2297
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002298- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002299 MS Office extensions.
2300
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002301- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2302 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2303
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002304- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2305 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2306
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002307- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2308 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2309 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2310 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2311 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2312 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2313
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002314- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2315 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2316 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002317
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002318- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2319 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2320 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2321
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002322- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2323
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002324- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2325 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2326 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2327
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002328Tools/Demos
2329-----------
2330
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002331- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2332 See the module docstring for details.
2333
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002334Build
2335-----
2336
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002337- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2338 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002339
2340C API
2341-----
2342
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002343- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2344
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002345- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2346 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2347 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2348
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002349- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2350 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002351
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002352 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2353 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2354 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002355
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002356- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002357 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2358
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002359- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2360 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2361 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002362
2363New platforms
2364-------------
2365
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002366None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002367
2368Tests
2369-----
2370
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002371- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2372 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002373
2374Windows
2375-------
2376
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002377- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2378 function.
2379
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002380- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2381 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002382
2383Mac
2384---
2385
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002386- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2387 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002388
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002389- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2390 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002391
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002392- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2393 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2394 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002395
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002396- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002397 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2398 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002399
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002400- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2401 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002402
2403
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002404What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2405=================================
2406
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002407*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002408
2409Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002410-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002411
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002412- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2413 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2414 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2415
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002416- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2417 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2418 (SF patch #664376.)
2419
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002420- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2421 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2422 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2423 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2424 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2425 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002426 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002427
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002428- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2429 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2430 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2431 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002432 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002433
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002434- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2435 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2436 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2437 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2438 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2439 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2440 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2441 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2442 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2443 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2444 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2445
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002446- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2447 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2448 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2449 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2450 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2451 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2452
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002453- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2454 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2455
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002456- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2457 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2458 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2459 case.)
2460
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002461- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2462 passed as unicode strings.
2463
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002464- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2465 See SF bug #683467.
2466
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002467- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2468 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2469
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002470- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2471
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002472- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2473
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002474- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2475 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2476 arguments.
2477
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002478- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2479 See SF bug #667147.
2480
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002481- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002482 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002483 See SF bug #676155.
2484
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002485- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002486 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002487 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2488 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2489 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2490 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2491 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2492 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002494Extension modules
2495-----------------
2496
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002497- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2498 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2499 tp_as_number pointer.
2500
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002501- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2502 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2503 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2504 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2505 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2506
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002507- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2508
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002509- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2510
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002511- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002512 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002513 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2514 patch #678531.)
2515
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002516- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2517 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2518
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002519- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2520 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2521
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002522- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2523
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002524- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2525 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2526 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2527
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002528- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2529
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002530- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2531 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2532
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002533- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002534
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002535- datetime changes:
2536
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002537 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2538
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002539 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2540 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2541 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2542 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2543 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2544 now.
2545
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002546 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002547 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2548 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002549
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002550 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002551 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002552 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2553 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2554 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2555 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002556
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002557 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2558 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2559 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002560 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2561
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002562 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2563 by a later example coded by Guido.
2564
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002565 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002566 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2567 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2568 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002569 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2570 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2571
2572 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2573 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2574 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2575 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2576 tzinfo subclass instance.
2577
2578 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2579 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2580 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2581 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2582 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2583 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2584 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2585 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002586
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002587 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2588 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2589 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2590 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2591 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002592 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2593
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002594 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002595
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002596 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2597 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2598 as a naive datetime object.
2599
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002600 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2601 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2602 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2603
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002604 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2605 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2606 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2607 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2608 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2609 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2610 comparison.
2611
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002612 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2613 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2614 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2615 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002616 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002617
2618 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002619
2620 and ::
2621
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002622 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2623
2624 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2625 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2626 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2627 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2628
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002629 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2630 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2631 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2632 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2633 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2634
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002635 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2636 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002637 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2638 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002639
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002640Library
2641-------
2642
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002643- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2644 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2645
2646- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2647 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2648 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2649 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2650 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2651 See PEP 307 for details.
2652
2653- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2654 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2655
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002656- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2657 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002658 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002659 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2660 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002661 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002662
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002663- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2664 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2665
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002666- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2667 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2668 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2669
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002670- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2671
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002672- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2673 exception.
2674
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002675- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2676 class.
2677
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002678- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2679 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2680 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2681
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002682- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2683 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2684
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002685- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002686 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2687 See SF bug #659228.
2688
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002689- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2690 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2691 See SF patch #651082.
2692
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002693- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002694
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002695- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2696 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2697
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002698- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002699 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002700
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002701- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2702 DOS paths from other platforms.
2703
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002704Tools/Demos
2705-----------
2706
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002707- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2708 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2709 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2710 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2711 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2712 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2713 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2714 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2715 example:
2716
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002717 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2718 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002719
2720 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2721
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002722
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002723Build
2724-----
2725
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002726- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2727 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2728 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002729 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2730
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002731 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2732
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002733- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2734 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2735 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2736 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2737 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2738 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2739 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2740 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2741 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2742
2743- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2744 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2745 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2746 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2747
2748- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2749 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2750
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002751C API
2752-----
2753
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002754- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2755 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002756
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002757- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2758 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2759 tp_as_number pointer.
2760
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002761- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2762 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2763 (SF #681367)
2764
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002765- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2766 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2767 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2768 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002769
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002770Tests
2771-----
2772
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002773- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002774 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2775 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2776 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2777 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2778 pydoc.)
2779
2780- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2781
2782- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002783
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002784Windows
2785-------
2786
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002787- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2788 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2789 time).
2790
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002791- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2792 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2793
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002794- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2795 release without strong cryptography.
2796
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002797- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002798 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002799
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002800- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2801 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2802
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002803Mac
2804---
2805
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002806- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2807 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002808
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002809- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2810 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2811 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002812
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002813- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2814 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002815
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002816- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2817 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2818 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2819 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002820
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002821- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002822 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2823 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2824 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002826
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002827What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002828=================================
2829
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002830*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002832Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002834
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002835- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2836
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002837- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2838 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002839 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002840 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002841 a different meaning than before.
2842
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002843- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002844 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002845 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002846
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002847- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002848 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002849 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002850
2851- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2852 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2853 and deallocation.
2854
2855- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2856 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2857
2858- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2859 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2860 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2861 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2862 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2863
2864- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2865 now detected by the garbage collector.
2866
2867- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2868 [SF bug 519621]
2869
2870- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2871 identifier.
2872
2873- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2874 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2875 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2876 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2877 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2878 [SF bug 563060]
2879
2880- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2881 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2882 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2883 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2884 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2885
2886- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2887 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2888 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2889
2890- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2891
2892- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2893 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2894 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2895 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2896 state of the slots would be lost.)
2897
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002898Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002900
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002901- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002902 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2903 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2904 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2905 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002906 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2907 Jython 2.1.
2908
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002909- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002910 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002911 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2912 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2913 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2914 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2915 these, see PEP 302.
2916
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002917- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2918 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2919 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2920
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002921- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2922 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2923 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2924
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002925- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2926 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2927 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2928
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002929- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2930 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2931 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2932 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2933 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2934 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2935 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2936 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2937 releases or implementations.
2938
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002939- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002940 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2941 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002942
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002943- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2944 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2945
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002946- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2947 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2948 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2949
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002950- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2951 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2952
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002953- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2954 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002955 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2956 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002957
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002958- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2959 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2960 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2961 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2962 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2963
2964 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2965 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2966 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2967 pattern.
2968
2969 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2970 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2971 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2972 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2973
2974 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2975 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2976 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2977 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2978 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2979 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2980
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002981- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2982 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2983 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2984 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2985 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2986 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2987 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2988 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002989
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002990- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2991 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2992 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2993 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2994 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002995 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2996 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2997 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2998 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2999 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3000 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3001 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003002
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003003- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3004 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3005
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003006- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3007 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3008 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3009 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3010 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3011 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3012 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3013 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3014 to Zack Weinberg!
3015
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003016- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3017 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3018 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3019 type. This has been fixed now.
3020
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003021- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3022 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3023 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3024
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003025- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3026 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3027 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3028 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3029 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3030 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3031 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3032 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003033 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003034
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003035- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3036 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3037 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003038
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003039- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3040 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3041 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3042 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3043 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3044 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3045 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3046 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003047 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003048 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3049 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3050
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003051- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3052 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3053 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3054 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3055 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3056 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3057 this.)
3058
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003059- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3060 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003061 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003062 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003063 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3064 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003065 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3066 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003067
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003068- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3069 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3070 currently running.
3071
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003072- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3073 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3074 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3075 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3076
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003077- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3078 as directory names.
3079
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003080- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3081 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3082
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003083- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3084 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3085
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003086- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003087 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3088 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003089
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003090- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3091 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3092 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3093 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3094 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3095
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003096- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3097 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3098 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3099 removed.
3100
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003101- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3102 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3103 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3104
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003105- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3106 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3107 to __debug__.
3108
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003109- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3110 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3111 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3112
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003113- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3114 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3115 deprecated now.
3116
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003117- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3118 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3119 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003120
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003121- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3122 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3123 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3124 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3125 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003126
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003127- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3128 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3129
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003130- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3131 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3132 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003133 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003134 is backward compatible.
3135
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003136- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3137 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3138 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3139 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3140 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3141
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003142- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3143 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3144 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3145 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3146 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3147 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003148
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003149- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3150 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3151
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003152- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3153 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3154
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003155- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3156 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3157 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3158 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3159 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3160
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003161- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3162 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3163 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3164
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003165- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003166 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3167
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003168- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3169 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3170 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003171
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003172- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3173 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3174
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003175- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3176 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3177 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3178
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003179- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3180
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003181Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003182-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003183
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003184- Added three operators to the operator module:
3185 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3186 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3187 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3188
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003189- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3190
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003191- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3192 archives.
3193
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003194- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3195 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3196 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3197
3198 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3199
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003200- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3201 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3202 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003203 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003204
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003205- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3206 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3207 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3208 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003209 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3210 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3211 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3212 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003213
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003214- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3215 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003216
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003217- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3218
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003219- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3220 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3221
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003222- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3223 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3224 supported.
3225
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003226- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3227
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003228- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3229 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003230
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003231- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3232 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3233
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003234- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3235
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003236- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3237 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3238
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003239- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3240 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3241 functions but callable type objects.
3242
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003243- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003244 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003245 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003246
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003247- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3248 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003249
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003250- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3251 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003252
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003253- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3254 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3255 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3256 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3257
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003258- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3259 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003260
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003261- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3262 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3263 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3264 and __imul__.
3265
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003266- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003267 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3268 is called.
3269
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003270- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3271 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3272 interpreter was compiled.
3273
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003274- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3275 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3276 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003277 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003278 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3279 1, not 2.
3280
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003281- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3282 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3283 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3284 limit.
3285
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003286- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3287 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3288 bug #623464.
3289
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003290- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3291 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3292 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3293 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3294
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003295Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003297
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003298- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3299
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003300- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3301 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3302 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3303 with Python 2.3a2.
3304
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003305- os.path exposes getctime.
3306
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003307- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003308 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003309 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003310 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003311 unit tests of floating point results.
3312
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003313- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3314 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3315 has been increased.
3316
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003317- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3318 executed.
3319
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003320- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3321 postinstallation script.
3322
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003323- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3324 test the current module.
3325
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003326- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003327 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3328 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3329 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3330 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3331
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003332- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003333 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003334 Ward's Optik package.
3335
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003336- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3337 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3338 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3339 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3340
3341- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3342 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003343 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003344
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003345- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3346 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3347 shelf are binary pickles.
3348
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003349- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3350 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3351
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003352- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3353 modules are iterators now.
3354
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003355- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3356 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3357 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3358 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3359 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3360 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003361
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003362- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3363 with their entity value.
3364
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003365- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3366
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003367- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3368 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003369
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003370- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3371 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003372 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003373
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003374- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3375 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3376 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3377 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3378 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3379 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3380 main():
3381
3382 import locale
3383 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3384
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003385- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3386 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3387
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003388- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3389 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3390 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3391 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3392 to the new standard.
3393
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003394- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3395 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3396 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3397 an extension to the database.
3398
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003399- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3400 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3401 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3402 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003403 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003404
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003405- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003406 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003407
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003408- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3409 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3410 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3411 bounded integers.
3412
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003413- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3414 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3415 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3416 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3417 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3418 in existence.
3419
3420 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3421 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3422 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3423 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3424 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3425 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3426
3427 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3428 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3429 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3430 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3431
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003432- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3433 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3434 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3435
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003436- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3437
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003438- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3439 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3440 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3441 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3442
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003443- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3444 argument.
3445
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003446- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3447 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3448 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3449 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3450 [SF patch 560794].
3451
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003452- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3453 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3454 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003455 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3456 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3457 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003458
3459- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3460 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003461
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003462- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3463 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3464 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3465 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003466
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003467- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3468 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3469 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3470 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3471 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3472
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003473- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003474
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003475- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3476
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003477- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3478 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3479 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3480 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3481 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3482 identical to None.
3483
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003484- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3485 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3486 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3487 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3488 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3489 results now.
3490
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003491- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3492 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3493
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003494- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3495 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3496 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3497 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3498 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3499 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3500 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3501 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3502
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003503- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3504
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003505- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3506 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3507
3508- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3509 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3510 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3511 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3512 and other systems.
3513
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003514- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3515 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3516 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3517 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 +00003518 work well with these.
3519
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003520- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3521
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003522- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003523 connections.
3524
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003525- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3526 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3527 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3528
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003529- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3530 sets
3531
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003532- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3533 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3534 name.
3535
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003536- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3537 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3538 passed in.
3539
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003540- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003541 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003542 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3543 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003544
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003545- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3546
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003547- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3548
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003549- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3550 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3551 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3552
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003553- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3554 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3555 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3556 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003557 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003558
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003559- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003560 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003561 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003562
3563- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3564 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3565 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3566
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003567- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003568 the value of its expression argument.
3569
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003570- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3571 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3572 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3573
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003574- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3575 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3576 skipstone browser was included.
3577
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003578- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3579 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3580
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003581Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003583
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003584- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3585 names in addition to accepting file names.
3586
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003587- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3588 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3589 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3590 still used and useful.)
3591
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003592- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3593 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3594 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3595 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003596
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003597- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3598 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3599 the generated binary.
3600
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003601Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003602-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003603
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003604- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3605
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003606- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3607 except in the hands of experts.
3608
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003609- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003610 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3611 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3612 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003613
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003614- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3615 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3616 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3617 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3618 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3619 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3620 builds.
3621
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003622- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3623 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3624 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3625 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3626 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3627 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3628 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3629 new type.
3630
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003631- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003632
3633 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3634 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3635 positive infinities.
3636
3637 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3638 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3639 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3640 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3641 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3642 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3643 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3644
3645 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3646
3647 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3648
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003649- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3650 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3651 size of the executable.
3652
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003653- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3654 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3655 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3656 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003657
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003658- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3659
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003660- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3661 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3662 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003663
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003664- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3665 well as Unix.
3666
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003667- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3668 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3669 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3670 modules in the README file for details.
3671
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003672C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003674
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003675- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3676 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003677 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003678 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003679 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003680
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003681- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3682 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3683 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3684 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3685 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3686 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003687 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003688 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3689 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3690 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3691 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3692 aligned.)
3693
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003694- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3695 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3696 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3697
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003698- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3699 level.
3700
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003701- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3702 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3703 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3704 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3705 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3706
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003707- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3708 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3709 code.
3710
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003711- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3712 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3713 adjusting for negative indices.
3714
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003715- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3716 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3717 object.
3718
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003719- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3720 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3721 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3722
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003723- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3724 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003725
3726- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3727
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003728- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3729 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3730 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3731 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3732
3733- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3734
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003735- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003736
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003737- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003738 without going through the buffer API.
3739
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003741
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003742- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3743 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3744 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3745 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3746
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003747- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3748 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3749
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003750- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003751 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3752
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003753New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003755
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003756- OpenVMS is now supported.
3757
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003758- AtheOS is now supported.
3759
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003760- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3761
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003762- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003764Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765-----
3766
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003767- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3768 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3769 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003770
3771Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003773
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003774- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3775 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3776 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3777 bugs.
3778 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003779 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003780 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3781 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003782 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003783
3784- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003785 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003786
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003787- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3788 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3789
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003790- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3791 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003792 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003793 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3794
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003795- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3796 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3797 use files" uninstall option).
3798
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003799- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3800
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003801- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3802 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3803
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003804- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3805 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3806 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3807
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003808- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3809 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3810 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3811 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3812 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003813 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3814 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3815 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003816
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003817- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003818 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003819 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3820 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3821 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3822 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3823 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3824 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3825 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3826 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3827 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3828 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3829 work around.
3830
3831- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3832 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3833 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3834 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3835 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3836 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3837 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3838 specified with O_CREAT too).
3839
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003840Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841----
3842
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003843- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003844
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003845- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3846 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3847 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3848
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003849- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3850 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3851 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3852
3853- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3854 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3855 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3856 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3857 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3858 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3859 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3860 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003861
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003862- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3863 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3864 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003865
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003866- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3867 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3868 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3869 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3870 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003872- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3873 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3874 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003875
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003876- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3877 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003878
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003879- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3880 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3881 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3882 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3883 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003884
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003885- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3886 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3887 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3888
3889- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3890 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3891 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003892
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003893- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3894 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3895 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3896 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003897 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003899- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3900 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003901
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003902- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3903 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003904
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003905- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003906 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003907 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3908 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003909
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003910
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003911What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003912===============================
3913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3915
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003916Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003918
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003919- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3920 with a custom metaclass.
3921
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003922Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003924
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003925- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3926 are proxies.
3927
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003928Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003930
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003931- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3932 very short strings.
3933
3934- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3935 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3936 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3937 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3938 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3939
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003940Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003942
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003943- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3944 close or delete time).
3945
3946- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3947 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3948
3949- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3950
3951- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003952 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003953
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003954Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003956
3957Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003959
3960C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003962
3963New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003965
3966Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003968
3969Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003971
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003972- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3973
3974- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3975 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3976
3977- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3978 deleted at process exit time.
3979
3980- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3981 in backslash.
3982
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003983Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003985
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003986- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3987 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3988 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3989
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003990
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003991What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003992===========================
3993
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3995
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003996Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003998
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003999- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4000 been extensively updated. See
4001
4002 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4003
4004 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4005
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004006- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4007 deleted!
4008
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004009- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4010 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4011 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4012 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4013 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4014
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004015- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4016
4017 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4018 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4019
4020 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4021 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4022 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4023 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4024 supported anyway.
4025
4026 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4027 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4028
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004029- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4030 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4031 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4032 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4033 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004034
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004035- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4036 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4037 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4038
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004039Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004041
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004042- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4043 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4044 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4045 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4046 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4047 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004048 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4049 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4050 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4051 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004052
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004053- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4054 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4055 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4056
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004057Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004059
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004060- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4061
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004062Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004064
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004065- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4066 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4067 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4068 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4069 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4070 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4071
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004072- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4073
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004074- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4075
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004076- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4077
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004078- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4079 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4080 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4081
4082- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4083
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004084Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004086
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004087- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4088 off a search on Google.
4089
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004090Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004092
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004093- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4094 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4095 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4096 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4097 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4098 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4099 other platforms should do likewise.
4100
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004101- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4102 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4103 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4104
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004105C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004107
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004108- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4109 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4110 producing key-value pairs.
4111
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004112- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004113 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004114 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4115 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4116 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4117 previously went unchallenged.
4118
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004119New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004121
4122Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004124
4125Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004127
4128Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004130
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004131- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4132 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004133
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004134- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4135 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4136 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4137 home.
4138
4139
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004140What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004141===========================
4142
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4144
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004145Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004147
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004148- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4149 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004150
4151 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004152 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004153
4154 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4155 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004156 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004157 This needs to be documented.
4158
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004159- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4160 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4161
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004162- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4163 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4164 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4165
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004166- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4167 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4168
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004169- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4170 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4171 class forbids it).
4172
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004173- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4174 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4175 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4176
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004177- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4178
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004179Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004181
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004182- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4183 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004184 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004185
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004186- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4187 (like 1 + '').
4188
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004189Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004191
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004192- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4193 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4194 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4195 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004196 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004197 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4198
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004199- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4200 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4201 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4202 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4203
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004204- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4205 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004206 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4207 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4208 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004209
4210- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4211 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004212
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004213- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4214 bytes on its input.
4215
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004216Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004218
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004219- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004220 convenience function.
4221
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004222- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4223 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4224 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004225 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4226 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4227 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4228 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4229 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4230 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004231
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004232- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4233 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4234 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4235 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4236
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004237- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4238 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4239 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4240
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004241- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4242 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4243 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4244 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4245
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004246- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4247 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004249 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4250 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4251 new -l and -e options.
4252
4253- statcache is now deprecated.
4254
4255- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4256 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004258 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4259 time properly taken into account.
4260
4261- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4262 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4263 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4264 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4265
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004266Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004268
4269Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004271
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004272- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4273 is built with libdb3 if available.
4274
4275- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4276
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004277C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004279
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004280- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4281 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4282 PySequence_Size().
4283
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004284- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4285
4286- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4287 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4288 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4289
4290- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4291 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4292
4293- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4294 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4295
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004296New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004298
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004299- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4300 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4301
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004302- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4303 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4304
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004305- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4306
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004307Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004309
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004310- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4311 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004313Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004315
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004316Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004318
4319- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4320 removed completely in the next release.
4321
4322- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4323 OSX.
4324
4325- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4326 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4327
4328- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4329
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004330
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004331What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004332===========================
4333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4335
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004336Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004338
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004339- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004340 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004341 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004342 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4343 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004344 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4345 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004346 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4347 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004348
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004349- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4350 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4351
4352- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4353 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4354
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004355Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004357
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004358- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4359 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4360 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4361 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4362 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4363 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4364 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4365 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4366
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004367- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4368 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4369 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4370 example).
4371
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004372- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004373 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004374 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004375 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004376
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004377- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4378 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4379 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004380 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004381
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004382- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4383 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4384 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4385 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4386 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4387 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4388
4389 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4390
4391 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4392
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004393Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004395
4396- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4397
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004398- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4399
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004400- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4401 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004402
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004403- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4404 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4405 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4406 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4407 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4408 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004409 attributes.
4410
4411- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4412 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4413 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004414
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004415- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4416 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4417 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004418
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004419- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4420 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4421 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004422 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4423 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4424
4425- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4426 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004427
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004428Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004430
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004431- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4432 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4433
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004434- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4435 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4436 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4437 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4438
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004439- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4440 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4441 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4442 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4443
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004444 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4445 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4446 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4447 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4448 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4449 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4450 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4451 without losing information).
4452
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004453- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004454 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4455 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4456 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4457 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4458 module).
4459
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004460 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004461 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4462 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4463 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4464 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004465
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004466- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004467 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4468 encoding.
4469
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004470- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4471 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4472
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004474 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4475
4476- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4477 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4478 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4479 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4480
4481- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4482
4483- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4484 ON, and OFF.
4485
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004486- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4487 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4488
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004489Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004491
4492- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4493 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4494 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004495
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004496- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4497 been added: -X and -E.
4498
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004499Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004501
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004502- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4503 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4504
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004505C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004507
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004508- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4509 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4510 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4511 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4512 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4513
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004514- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4515 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4516 as long) arguments.
4517
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004518- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4519 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4520 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4521 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4522 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4523 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4524
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004525- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4526 input.
4527
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004528New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004530
4531Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004533
4534Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004536
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004537- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4538 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4539 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4540
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004541- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4542 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4543 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004544 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004545
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4547 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4548 import signal
4549 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004550
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004552 while 1:
4553 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004555 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4556 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4557 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4558 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004559
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004560
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004561What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4562===========================
4563
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4565
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004566Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004568
4569- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4570 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4571 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4572
4573- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4574 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4575 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4576 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4577 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4578 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4579 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004580
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004581- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004582 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004583 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4584 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4585 associate a docstring with a property.
4586
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004587- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4588 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4589 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4590 other built-in object types.
4591
4592- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4593 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4594 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4595 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4596 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4597
4598- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4599 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4600
4601- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4602 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004603 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004604 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4605 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4606 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4607 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4608 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4609
4610- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4611 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4612 class.
4613
4614- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4615 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4616 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4617 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4618
4619- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4620 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4621 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4622 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4623
4624- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4625 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4626
4627- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4628 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4629 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4630 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4631 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004632 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004633 with the same value as s.
4634
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004635- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4636
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004637Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004639
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004640- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4641
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004642- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4643 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4644 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4645 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4646 objects.
4647
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004648- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4649 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004650 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4651 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4652
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004653- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4654 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4655 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4656
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004657Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004659
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004660- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4661 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4662 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4663 by the instances.
4664
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004665- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4666 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4667 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4668
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004669- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4670 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4671 before the entire comparison is complete.
4672
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004673- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4674 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4675 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4676
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004677- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4678 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4679 getwriter().
4680
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004681- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4682 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4683
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004684- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004685 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4686 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4687
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004688- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4689 iterable object.
4690
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004691- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4692 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004693
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004694- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4695 authentication.
4696
4697- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4698 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004699
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004700- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004701 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4702 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4703 a sample driver.)
4704
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004705Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004708- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4709 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4710 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4711 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4712 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4713 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4714 kernel has large file support.
4715
4716- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4717 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4718 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4719 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4720 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4721
4722- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4723 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4724 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4725
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004726C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004728
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004729- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4730 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4731
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004732New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004734
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004735- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4736 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004738Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004740
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004741- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4742 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4743 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4744 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4745 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4746
4747- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4748 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4749 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4750 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4751
4752- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4753 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004755Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004757
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004758- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004759 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4760 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004761
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004762
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004763What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4764===========================
4765
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004766*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4767
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004768Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004770
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004771- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4772 big to represent as a C double.
4773
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004774- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4775 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4776 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4777 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4778 restriction).
4779
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004780- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4781 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4782 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4783 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4784 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4785
4786 >>> dir([])
4787 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4788 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4789 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4790 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4791 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4792 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4793 'reverse', 'sort']
4794
4795 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4796
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004797- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004798 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4799 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4800 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4801 OverflowError exception.
4802
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004803- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004804 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004805 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4806 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4807 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4808 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4809 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004810 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4812 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4813
4814 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4815 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4816 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4817 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004818
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004819- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004820 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4821 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4822 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4823 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4824 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4825 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4826 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4827 once it is created.
4828
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004829- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4830 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4831 (key, value) pairs.
4832
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004833- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004834 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4835 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4836
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004837- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4838 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4839 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4840 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4841 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004842
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004843- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004844 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4845 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4846
4847 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4848
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004849- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004850 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4851
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004852Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004854
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004855- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004856 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4857 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004858
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004859- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4860 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4861 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4862 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4863 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4864 in this area anymore).
4865
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004866- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4867 threading.Timer.
4868
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004869- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4870 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4871
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004872- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004873 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4874
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004875- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004876 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4877 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4878 converted to Python longs.
4879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004880- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004881 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4882
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004883- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4884 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4885 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4886
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004887Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004889
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004890- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4891 division operators as per PEP 238.
4892
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004893Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004895
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004896- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4897 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4898 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4899 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4900
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004901C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004903
4904- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004905
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004906- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4907 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004908 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004909
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4911 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004912 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004914
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004915- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004916 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4917 module:
4918
4919 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004920
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004921 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4922 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004923
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004924 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4925 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004926
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004927 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4928
4929 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4930
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004931- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004932 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4933 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4934 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004935
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004936New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004938
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004939- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4940 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4941 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4942 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4943 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004944
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004945Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004947
4948Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004950
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004951- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4952 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4953 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4954 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004955 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4956 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4957 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4958 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4959 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004960
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004961- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004962 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4963
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004964
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004965What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4966===========================
4967
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4969
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004970Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004971-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004972
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004973- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4974 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4975
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004976- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4977 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4978 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004979
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004980- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4981 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4982 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4983 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004984
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004985- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4986
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004988
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004989Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004990-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004991
4992- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004993 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004994 the module docstring for details.
4995
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004998
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004999- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005000 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5001 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5002 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005003
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005004- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5005 Nick Mathewson.
5006
5007Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005009
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005010- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5011 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5012 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5013 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5014 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5015 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5016 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5017 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5018
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005019- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5020 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5021 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5022 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5023
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005024- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5025 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5026 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5027 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5028 come a long way).
5029
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005030- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5031 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5032 write filters for these warnings).
5033
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005034- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5035 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5036 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5037 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5038 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5039
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005040- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5041 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5042 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5043 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5044 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5045 older distribution.
5046
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005047Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005049
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005050- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5051 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005052 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005053
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005054- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5055 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5056 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5057
5058- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5059
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005060- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5061
5062- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5063
5064- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5065
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005067
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005068- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5069
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005070New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005072
5073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005075
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005076- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5077 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5078 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5079 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5080 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5081 against buffer overruns.
5082
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005083- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005084 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5085 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005086 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5087 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5088 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5089
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005090- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5091 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5092 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5093 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5094 deprecated.
5095
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005096Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005098
5099- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5100 relevant is found.
5101
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005102
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005103What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005104===========================
5105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5107
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005108Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005110
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005111- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5112 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5113 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5114 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5115 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5116 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5117 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5118 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005119 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005120 repaired.
5121
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005122- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005123 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005124 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5125 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5126 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5127 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5128 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5129 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5130 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5131 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5132
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005133- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5134 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5135 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5136 leading BMO character).
5137
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005138- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5139 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5140 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5141
5142 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5143 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5144 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005145
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005146 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5147 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5148 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5149 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5150 for various simple to use conversions.
5151
5152 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5153 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5156 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5157 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5158 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5159 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5160 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5161 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5162 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5163 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5164 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5165 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5166 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5168 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5169 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005170
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005171- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5172 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5173 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005174 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005175 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005176
5177 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005178 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5179 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5180 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5181 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5182 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005183 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5184 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005185
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005186 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5187 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5188 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005189 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005190
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005191- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5192 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5193 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5194 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5195 floating arithmetic,
5196
5197 x = 9007199254740992.0
5198 print long(x)
5199
5200 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5201 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5202 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5203 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5204 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5205 functions are of good quality).
5206
5207 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5208 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5209 algorithms to break.
5210
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005211- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5212 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5213 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5214 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5215 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5216 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5217 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5218 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5219 order.
5220
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005221- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5222 operation along the most common code paths.
5223
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005224- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5225 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5226
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005227- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5228 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5229 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5230 {}.update(UserDict())
5231
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005232- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5233 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5234 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5235 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5236 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5237 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5238 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5239 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5240
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005241- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005242 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005244 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005245 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5246 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005247 join() method of strings
5248 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005249 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5250 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005252 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005253
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005254- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5255 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5256
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005257- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5258 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5259
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005260- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5261 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5262 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5263 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5264
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005265- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5266 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005267 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005268 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5269 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005270
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005271- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5272
5273
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005274Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005276
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005277- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005278 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005279 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5280 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5281
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005282- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5283 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5284
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005285- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5286 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5287 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5288 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5289
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005290- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5291 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5292 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5293
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005294- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5295
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005296- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5297
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005298- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5299 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5300 that are still imported into string.py).
5301
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005302- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5303
5304- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5305 Now it does.
5306
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005307- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5308
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005309- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5310 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5311 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5312 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5313 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005314 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5315 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005316
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005317- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5318 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5319 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5320 'help(object)'.
5321
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005322Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005324
5325- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005326 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005327 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5328 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5329
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005330- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005331 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5332 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005333
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005334C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005336
5337- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5338 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339
5340----
5341
5342**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**