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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000015- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
16 codes.
17
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000018- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
19 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
20 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
21
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000022- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
23 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
24
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000025- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000026 (fixes bug #1119418).
27
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000028- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
29
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000030- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
31 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
32
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000033- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
34 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
35 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
36
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000037- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
38
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000039- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
40 reference counts in some error exit cases.
41
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000042- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
43 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
44 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
45 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
46 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
47 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
48 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
49 realloc.
50
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000051- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
52 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
53
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000054- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
55 like their int counterparts.
56
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000057- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
58 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
59 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
60 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
61 for a longer write-up of the problem).
62
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000063- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
64 serializing floats.
65
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000066- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
67 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
68 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
69
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000070- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
71 278.
72
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000073- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
74 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
75 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
76 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000077 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000078 PyNumber_*().
79 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
80
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000081- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
82 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
83 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
84 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
85
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000086- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
87 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
88 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
89 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
90 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
91
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000092- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
93 disabled caused a crash.
94
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000095- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
96 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
97
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000098- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000099 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
100
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000101- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
102
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000103- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000104 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
105 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
106 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000107
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000108- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
109
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000110- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
111 returning None.
112
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000113- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000114 ('\') with a specific error message.
115
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000116- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
117
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000118- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
119 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
120
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000121- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000122 an ferror() call.
123
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000124- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
125 list.sort().
126
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000127- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
128 (2+3) --> (5).
129
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000130- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
131
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000132- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
133 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000134
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000135- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
136 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
137 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
138
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000139- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
140 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
141 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
142
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000143Extension Modules
144-----------------
145
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000146- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
147 the file system encoding.
148
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000149- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
150 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000151
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000152- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
153
154- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000155 line without newlines.
156
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000157- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
158 on Windows.
159
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000160- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
161 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
162
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000163- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
164 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
165 for large or negative values.
166
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000167- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000168 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000169
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000170- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
171
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000172- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
173 if available on the platform.
174
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000175- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
176 available on the platform.
177
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000178- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
179 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
180
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000181- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
182
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000183- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
184 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
185 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
186
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000187- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
188
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000189- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
190 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
191
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000192- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000193 file size.
194
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000195- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
196
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000197- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
198 {remove_history,replace_history}
199
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000200- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
201 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000202
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000203- stat_float_times is now True.
204
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000205- array.array objects are now picklable.
206
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000207- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
208 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
209
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000210- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
211 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
212 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
213
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000214- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
215 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216
217Library
218-------
219
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000220- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
221
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000222- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
223 functionality.
224
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000225- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
226
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000227- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
228 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
229
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000230- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
231 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
232 match the Content-Length header.
233
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000234- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
235
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000236- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
237 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
238 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
239
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000240- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
241
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000242- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
243
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000244- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
245 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
246
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000247- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
248 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
249 Tkdnd.
250
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000251- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
252 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
253
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000254- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
255 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
256
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000257- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000258 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
259
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000260- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
261 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
262
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000263- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
264 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
265
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000266- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000267 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000268
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000269- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
270
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000271- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
272 error messages.
273
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000274- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
275
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000276- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
277 Bug #1224621.
278
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000279- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
280 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
281 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
282 terminates by raising StopIteration.
283
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000284- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
285
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000286- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
287 component of the path.
288
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000289- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
290 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
291 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
292 class at all.
293
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000294- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
295 files to PyPI.
296
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000297- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
298 them to PyPI.
299
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000300- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
301 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
302 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
303 work as expected.
304
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000305- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
306 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
307
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000308- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000309 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
310
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000311- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
312
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000313- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
314 to build.
315
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000316- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
317 symbolic links on Windows.
318
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000319- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000320 profile.py if available.
321
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000322- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
323
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000324- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
325 in LWPCookieJar.
326
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000327- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
328
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000329- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
330
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000331- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
332
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000333- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
334
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000335- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
336
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000337- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
338
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000339- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
340
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000341- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
342
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000343- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
344 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
345 be exploited in various ways.
346
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000347- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
348
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000349- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
350
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000351- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
352
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000353- Enhancements to the csv module:
354
355 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000356 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000357 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000358 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
359 reporting.
360 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
361 dictates.
362 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000363 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000364 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000365 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
366 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000367 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
368 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000369 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000370 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
371 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
372 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
373 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
374 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
375 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
376 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
377 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
378 without first creating a dialect class.
379 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
380 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
381 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000382 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000383 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
384 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000385 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
386 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
387 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
388 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000389 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
390 This has been fixed.
391
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000392- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
393 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
394 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
395 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
396
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000397- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
398
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000399- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
400 (Bug #951915).
401
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000402- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
403 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
404 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000405 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000406
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000407- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
408
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000409- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
410 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
411
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000412- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
413
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000414- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
415
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000416- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
417
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000418- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
419
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000420- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
421
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000422- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
423 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
424 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
425
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000426- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000427 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000428
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000429- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
430 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
431 tokenizer with very long source lines.
432
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000433- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
434 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
435
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000436- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
437 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000438
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000439- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
440 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
441
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000442- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
443 correctly.
444
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000445- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
446 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
447 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
448 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
449 between two lines.
450
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000451- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
452 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
453 handlers.
454
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000455- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000456 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
457 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000458
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000459- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
460 considering it exactly like a '*'.
461
462
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000463Build
464-----
465
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000466- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
467 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
468
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000469- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
470 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
471
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000472- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
473 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
474 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000475 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000476
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000477- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
478 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
479 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
480
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000481- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
482
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000483- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
484 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
485
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000486- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
487 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
488 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
489 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
490 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
491 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
492 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
493 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
494
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000495- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
496 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
497 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
498 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
499
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000500
501C API
502-----
503
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000504- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
505
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000506- Removed PyRange_New().
507
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000508
509Tests
510-----
511
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000512- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000513
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000514
515Documentation
516-------------
517
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000518- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
519
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000520- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
521
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000522- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
523
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000524- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
525
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000526- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
527
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000528- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
529
530- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
531
532- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
533
534- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
535
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000536- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
537 Closes bug #1166582.
538
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000539- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
540 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
541 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
542
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000543Mac
544---
545
546
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000547New platforms
548-------------
549
550- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
551
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000552
553Tools/Demos
554-----------
555
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000556- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
557 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
558 source files that need an encoding declaration.
559 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
560
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000561- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
562
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000563- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000564
565
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000566What's New in Python 2.4 final?
567===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000568
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000569*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000570
571Core and builtins
572-----------------
573
574- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
575 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
576 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
577
578
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000579What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
580==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000581
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000582*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000583
584Core and builtins
585-----------------
586
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000587- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
588 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
589 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
590
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000591
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000592Library
593-------
594
595- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
596 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
597 raised is re-raised.
598
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000599- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
600 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
601
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000602- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
603 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
604 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
605 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
606 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
607 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
608 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
609 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
610 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
611 by the slice are recomputed now.
612
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000613- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000614
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000615Build
616-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000617
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000618- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
619 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
620 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000621
622C API
623-----
624
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000625- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
626
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000627
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000628What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
629================================
630
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000631*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000632
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000633License
634-------
635
636The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
637is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
638changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
639Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
640intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
641durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
642the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
643License::
644
645 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
646
647says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
648to Python 2.1.1.
649
650The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
651License Version 2.
652
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000653Core and builtins
654-----------------
655
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000656- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
657 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
658 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
659 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
660 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
661 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
662 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
663 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
664 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
665 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
666
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000667- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000668
669Extension Modules
670-----------------
671
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000672- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
673 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
674 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
675 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000676
677Library
678-------
679
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000680- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
681 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
682 returned.
683
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000684- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
685
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000686- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
687 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
688
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000689- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
690
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000691- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
692 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000693
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000694- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
695
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000696- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
697
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000698- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000699 the source code is updated and reloaded.
700
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000701Build
702-----
703
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000704- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000705
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000706What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
707================================
708
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000709*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000710
711Core and builtins
712-----------------
713
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000714- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000715 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
716
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000717- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
718 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
719 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
720 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
721
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000722- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
723 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
724
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000725- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
726 constant.
727
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000728- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
729 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
730 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
731 large), and to anomalies such as
732 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
733 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
734 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
735 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000736
737Extension modules
738-----------------
739
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000740- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
741 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000742 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
743 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
744 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000745
746Library
747-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000748
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000749- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000750 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000751 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
752 --swig-cpp.
753
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000754- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
755 it is set.
756
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000757- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000758
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000759- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
760 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
761 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
762 Closes bug #1039270.
763
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000764- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000765
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000766 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000767 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
768 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
769 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
770 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
771 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
772 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
773 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
774 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
775 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
776 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
777 + Updates to documentation.
778
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000779- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
780 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
781 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
782 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
783
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000784- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000785
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000786- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
787 applications should use the getmember function.
788
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000789- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
790
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000791- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
792 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
793 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
794 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
795 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
796 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
797 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
798 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
799 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
800
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000801- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
802 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000803 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000804
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000805- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
806 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
807 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
808 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
809 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
810 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
811 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
812 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000813
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000814- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
815 the new public features (of which there are many).
816
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000817- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000818 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
819 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
820 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
821 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000822 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000823
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000824- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
825
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000826- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
827 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
828 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
829 options.
830
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000831- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
832 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
833 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
834 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
835 conditions under which non-string values work.
836
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000837Build
838-----
839
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000840- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
841 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
842 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
843
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000844- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
845 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
846 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
847 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
848 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000849
850C API
851-----
852
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000853- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
854 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
855
856- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
857
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000858- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
859 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
860 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
861 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
862 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
863 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
864 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
865 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
866 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
867
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000868- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
869
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000870- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
871 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
872 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000873
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000874Tests
875-----
876
877- test__locale ported to unittest
878
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000879Mac
880---
881
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000882- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
883 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
884 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000885
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000886Tools/Demos
887-----------
888
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000889- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
890 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
891 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
892 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
893 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000894
895
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000896What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
897=================================
898
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000899*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000900
901Core and builtins
902-----------------
903
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000904- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000905 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
906
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000907- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
908 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
909 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
910 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
911 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
912 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
913 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
914 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000915 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
916 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
917 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
918 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
919 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000920
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000921- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
922 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
923 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
924 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
925 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
926
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000927- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
928
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000929- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
930 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
931
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000932- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
933 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
934 modified the list.
935
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000936- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
937 functions is now writable.
938
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000939- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
940 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
941 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
942 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
943
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000944- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
945 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
946 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
947 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
948 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000949
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000950- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
951 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
952
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000953Extension modules
954-----------------
955
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000956- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
957
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000958- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
959 data.
960
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000961- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
962 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
963 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
964 supposed to have been truncated away.
965
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000966- Added socket.socketpair().
967
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000968- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
969 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
970
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000971- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000972 versions of Python, have now been removed.
973
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000974Library
975-------
976
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000977- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000978 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000979
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000980- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
981 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
982
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000983- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
984 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
985
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000986- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
987
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000988- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
989 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000990
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000991- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
992 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
993
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000994- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
995
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000996- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
997
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000998- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
999
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001000- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1001 Percivall.
1002
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001003- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1004 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1005
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001006- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1007 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1008 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001009 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001010
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001011- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1012 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1013 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1014 and exponent.
1015
1016- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1017
1018- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001019 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001020 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1021
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001022- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1023 to the readline module.
1024
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001025- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001026 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1027 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001028
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001029- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1030 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1031 contains symlinks.
1032
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001033- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1034 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1035
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001036- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1037 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1038 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1039
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001040- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1041 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1042 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1043 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1044 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1045 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1046 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1047 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1048 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1049 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1050 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1051 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1052 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1053
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001054- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1055
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001056Tools/Demos
1057-----------
1058
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001059- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1060 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1061
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001062- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1063
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001064Build
1065-----
1066
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001067- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1068 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1069 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1070 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1071 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1072 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1073 plans to do so.
1074
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001075- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1076 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1077
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001078- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1079 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1080
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001081- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1082 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1083
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001084- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1085 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1086
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001087- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1088 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1089
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001090C API
1091-----
1092
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001093..
1094
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001095Documentation
1096-------------
1097
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001098- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1099 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1100
1101- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1102 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1103 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001104
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001105New platforms
1106-------------
1107
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001108- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1109
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001110Tests
1111-----
1112
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001113..
1114
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001115Windows
1116-------
1117
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001118- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1119 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1120 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1121 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1122 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1123 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1124 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1125 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1126 the problem.
1127
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001128Mac
1129---
1130
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001131..
1132
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001133
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001134What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1135=================================
1136
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001137*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001138
1139Core and builtins
1140-----------------
1141
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001142- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1143 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1144 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1145 sensitive code.
1146
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001147- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001148 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001149
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001150 @staticmethod
1151 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001152
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001153 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001154
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001155- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1156 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1157 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1158 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1159 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1160 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1161 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1162 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1163 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1164 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1165 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1166
1167 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1168 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1169 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1170 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1171 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1172 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1173 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1174
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001175- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1176 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1177
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001178- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001179 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001180
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001181- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001182 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001183 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1184
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001185- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001186 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1187 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1188
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001189- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1190 types that support garbage collection.
1191
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001192- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1193
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001194- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1195 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1196 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1197 Jython.
1198
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001199- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1200
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001201- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1202 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1203
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001204- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1205 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1206 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001207
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001208- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1209 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1210 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1211
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001212Extension modules
1213-----------------
1214
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001215- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1216
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001217Library
1218-------
1219
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001220- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1221 TIS-620
1222
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001223- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1224 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1225 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1226 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1227 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1228 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1229 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1230 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1231 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1232 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1233
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001234- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1235
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001236- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1237 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1238 same as when the argument is omitted).
1239 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1240
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001241- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1242
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001243- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1244 schemes are offered.
1245
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001246- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1247
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001248- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1249 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1250 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1251
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001252- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1253
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001254- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1255 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1256
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001257- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1258 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1259 when dummy_threading is being used.
1260
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001261- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1262 from a tarfile.
1263
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001264- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001265 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001266
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001267- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1268 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1269 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1270 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1271
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001272- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1273 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1274
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001275- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1276 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1277 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1278 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1279 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1280 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1281 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1282 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1283 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1284 by some other method in progress).
1285
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001286- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1287 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1288 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001289
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001290- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1291
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001292- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1293 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1294 AM Kuchling.
1295
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001296- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1297 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1298 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1299
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001300- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1301 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1302 instead of unsigned.
1303
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001304- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001305 no longer part of the public API.
1306
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001307- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1308 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1309 string methods of the same name).
1310
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001311- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001312 SF patch 945642.
1313
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001314- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1315
1316 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1317
1318 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1319 DocTestSuites.
1320
1321- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1322 that provide thread-local data.
1323
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001324- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1325 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1326
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001327- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1328
1329- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1330 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1331 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1332
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001333- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1334
1335 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1336 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1337 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001338
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001339 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1340 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1341 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1342 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1343
1344 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1345 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1346
1347 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1348 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1349 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1350 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1351
1352 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1353 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1354 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1355 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1356 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1357
1358 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1359 wrapping help output.
1360
1361 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1362 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1363 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001364
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001365C API
1366-----
1367
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001368- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1369 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1370 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1371 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1372 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1373 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1374 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1375 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1376 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1377 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1378 its visible semantics have not changed.
1379
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001380- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1381 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1382
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001383Documentation
1384-------------
1385
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001386- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001387
1388 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001389 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001390
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001391 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001392
1393 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1394
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001395- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001396
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001397Tests
1398-----
1399
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001400- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001401 platforms that use the Makefile.
1402
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001403- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1404 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1405 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1406
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001407
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001408What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1409=================================
1410
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001411*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001412
1413Core and builtins
1414-----------------
1415
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001416- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1417 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1418 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1419 objects now (one object instead of three).
1420
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001421- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1422 Windows DLLs.
1423
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001424- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1425 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001426
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001427- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1428 a new .pyc magic.
1429
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001430- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1431 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1432 be there.
1433
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001434- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1435 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1436 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1437
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001438- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1439 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1440 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1441
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001442- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1443
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001444- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1445 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1446 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001447
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001448- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1449 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1450
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001451- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1452
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001453- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001454 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001455
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001456- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1457
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001458- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1459
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001460- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1461 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1462
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001463- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1464 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1465 Fixes bug #858016 .
1466
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001467- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1468 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1469 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1470
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001471- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1472 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1473 improves their performance (about 35%).
1474
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001475- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1476 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1477 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1478
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001479- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1480 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1481 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1482 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1483
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001484- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1485 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001486 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001487 length is not known).
1488
1489- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1490 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001491 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1492 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001493 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1494
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001495- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1496 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1497
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001498- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1499 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1500 keyword arguments.
1501
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001502- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1503 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1504 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1505
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001506- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1507 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1508 cases.
1509
1510- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1511 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1512 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1513 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1514 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1515 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1516 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1517 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1518 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1519 a release build.
1520
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001521- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1522 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1523
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001524- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001525 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001526
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001527- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1528 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1529 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1530 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1531 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1532 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1533 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1534 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1535 destroyed.
1536
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001537- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1538 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1539 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1540 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1541 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1542 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1543 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1544 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1545
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001546- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1547 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1548 character other than a space.
1549
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001550- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1551 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1552 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1553 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1554 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1555 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1556 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1557 attributes with the same name.
1558
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001559- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1560 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1561 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1562 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1563 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1564 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1565 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1566 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1567 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1568 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1569 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1570 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1571 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1572 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001573
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001574- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1575 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1576 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1577 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1578 This has been repaired.
1579
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001580- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1581
1582- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1583
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001584- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1585 over a sequence.
1586
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001587- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001588 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001589
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001590- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1591
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001592- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1593 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1594 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1595 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1596 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1597 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1598 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1599 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1600
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001601- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1602 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1603 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1604
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001605- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1606 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1607 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1608 freelist.
1609
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001610- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1611 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1612
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001613- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1614 number.
1615
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001616- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1617 a TypeError exception.
1618
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001619- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1620 820195.
1621
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001622- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1623 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1624 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1625
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001626- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001627 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1628 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001629
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001630- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1631 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1632 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1633
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001634- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1635 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001636 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001637
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001638- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001639 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1640 the first call.
1641
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001642
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001643Extension modules
1644-----------------
1645
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001646- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1647 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1648
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001649- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1650 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1651 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1652 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1653 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1654 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1655 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001656
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001657- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1658
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001659- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1660
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001661- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1662 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1663
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001664- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1665 fewer false positives.
1666
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001667- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1668 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1669
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001670- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001671 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1672
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001673- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001674 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001675 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001676 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1677 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001678
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001679- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1680 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1681 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1682 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1683
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001684- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1685 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1686 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1687 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1688 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1689 #897625.
1690
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001691- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1692 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1693
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001694- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1695 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1696 and pops on either side of the deque.
1697
1698- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1699 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1700
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001701- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1702 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1703 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1704 other functions that expect a function argument.
1705
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001706- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1707
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001708- os.getsid was added.
1709
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001710- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1711 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1712 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1713
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001714- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1715
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001716- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1717
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001718- readline.clear_history was added.
1719
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001720- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1721
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001722- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1723
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001724- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1725
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001726- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1727
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001728- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1729
1730- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1731
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001732- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1733
1734- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1735
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001736- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1737 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1738 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1739
1740- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1741 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1742 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1743 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1744 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1745 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1746 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1747
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001748- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1749 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1750 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1751 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001752
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001753- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001754 iterators from a single iterable.
1755
1756- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1757 of raising a TypeError exception.
1758
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001759- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1760 as parameter.
1761
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001762Library
1763-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001764
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001765- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1766
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001767- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1768 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1769 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001770
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001771- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1772 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1773 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001774
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001775- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001776
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001777- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1778 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001779
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001780- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1781 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1782
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001783- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1784
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001785- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001786 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001787
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001788- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001789 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001790
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001791- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1792
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001793- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1794 on cygwin and mingw32.
1795
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001796- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1797
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001798- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1799 module.
1800
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001801- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1802 installation scheme for all platforms.
1803
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001804- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001805 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001806
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001807- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1808 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1809 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1810
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001811- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1812 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1813 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1814
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001815- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1816
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001817- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1818
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001819- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1820 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1821
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001822- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1823 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1824 type pattern with the same value exists.
1825
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001826- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1827 when run from the command prompt).
1828
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001829- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1830 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1831
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001832- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1833 default sort).
1834
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001835- Added global runctx function to profile module
1836
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001837- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1838
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001839- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1840
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001841- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1842
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001843- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001844 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1845 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1846 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1847 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1848 accordingly.
1849
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001850- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1851 decoding standards.
1852
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001853- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1854 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1855 called for all requests.
1856
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001857- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1858 they are passed to the compiler.
1859
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001860- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1861 indent, width and depth.
1862
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001863- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1864 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1865
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001866- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1867 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1868
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001869- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1870
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001871- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1872
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001873- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1874
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001875- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1876 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1877
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001878- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001879 for better performance.
1880
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001881- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001882
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001883- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1884 a string).
1885
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001886- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1887
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001888- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1889
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001890- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1891
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001892- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1893
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001894- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1895 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1896 list of fieldnames.
1897
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001898- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1899 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1900
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001901- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1902
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001903- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1904 empty lists.
1905
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001906- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1907 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1908 and shelves.
1909
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001910- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1911 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1912
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001913- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001914 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1915 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001916
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001917- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1918 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001919 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001920
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001921- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001922 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1923 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1924
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001925- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1926 and removed in Py2.4.
1927
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001928- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1929
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001930- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1931
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001932Tools/Demos
1933-----------
1934
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001935- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1936 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1937
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001938- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1939
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001940- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1941 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1942 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1943 destination in situations where both files are given.
1944
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001945- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1946 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1947 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1948 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1949
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001950- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1951
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001952- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1953 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1954 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1955 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1956 now.
1957
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001958- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1959 in effect
1960
1961- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1962 C-c C-h
1963
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001964- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1965 -d option was given.
1966
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001967Build
1968-----
1969
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001970- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1971 build under OS X.
1972
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001973- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1974 --enable-profiling.
1975
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001976- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1977 is configured --with-tsc.
1978
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001979- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1980 on AMD64.
1981
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001982- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1983 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1984
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001985- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1986 removed.
1987
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001988- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1989 supported (see PEP 11).
1990
1991- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1992
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001993- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1994
1995- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1996 (see PEP 11).
1997
1998- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1999 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2000
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002001C API
2002-----
2003
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002004- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2005 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2006 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2007
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002008- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2009 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2010 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2011 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2012
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002013- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2014 generator objects.
2015
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002016- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2017 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002018 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2019 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002020
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002021- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2022 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2023
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002024- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2025 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2026 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2027 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2028 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2029
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002030- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2031 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2032 about 10% faster.
2033
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002034- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2035 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2036
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002037- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2038 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2039 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2040 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2041
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002042Windows
2043-------
2044
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002045- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2046 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2047 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2048 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2049
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002050- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2051 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2052 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2053
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002054
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002055What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2056===============================
2057
2058*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2059
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002060IDLE
2061----
2062
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002063- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2064 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2065 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2066 context-menu actions.
2067
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002068- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2069 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2070 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2071 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2072 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2073 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2074 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2075 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2076 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2077
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002078
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002079What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2080=============================================
2081
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002082*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002083
2084Core and builtins
2085-----------------
2086
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002087- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002088 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002089 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2090
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002091Extension modules
2092-----------------
2093
2094- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2095 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2096 than once. This has been fixed.
2097
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002098- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2099 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2100 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2101 call.
2102
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002103- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2104
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002105Library
2106-------
2107
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002108- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2109 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2110
2111- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2112 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2113 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2114 restored.
2115
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002116IDLE
2117----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002118
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002119- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002120
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002121Build
2122-----
2123
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002124- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2125 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2126
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002127C API
2128-----
2129
2130Windows
2131-------
2132
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002133- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2134 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2135
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002136- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2137
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002138Mac
2139---
2140
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002141- Various fixes to pimp.
2142
2143- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2144
2145- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2146 more problems than it solves.
2147
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002148
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002149What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2150=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002151
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002152*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2153
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002154Core and builtins
2155-----------------
2156
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002157- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2158 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2159
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002160- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2161 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002162 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002163
2164- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2165 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2166 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002167 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002168
2169- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2170 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002171
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002172- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2173 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2174 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2175
2176- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002177 770247.
2178
2179- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002180
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002181Extension modules
2182-----------------
2183
2184- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2185 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2186
2187- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2188
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002189- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2190
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002191- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2192 contained within the _strptime module.
2193
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002194- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2195 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2196
2197- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002198 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2199
2200- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2201 the find_class attribute, if present.
2202
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002203- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002204
2205 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2206 (SF bug 763298).
2207
2208 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002209 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2210 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2211 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002212
2213 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2214
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002215Library
2216-------
2217
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002218- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2219
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002220- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2221 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2222 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2223 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2224 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2225 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2226 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2227 or Tester().
2228
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002229- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2230 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2231 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2232 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2233 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2234 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2235 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2236 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2237 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002238
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002239 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002240
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002241- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2242 weren't before was an oversight.
2243
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002244- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2245 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2246
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002247- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2248 when there are no lines.
2249
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002250- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2251 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2252
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002253- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2254 to child processes.
2255
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002256- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2257
2258- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2259
2260- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2261 xmlrpclib.
2262
2263- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2264 responses.
2265
2266- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2267 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2268
2269- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2270 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2271 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2272
2273- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2274 used as patterns.
2275
2276- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2277 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2278 than Tk 8.3.
2279
2280- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2281
2282- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002283
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002284Tools/Demos
2285-----------
2286
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002287- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2288
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002289- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2290
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002291- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002292
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002293Build
2294-----
2295
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002296- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2297
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002298- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2299
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2301 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002302
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002303- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2304 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2305 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002306
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002307C API
2308-----
2309
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002310- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2311 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2312
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002313Windows
2314-------
2315
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002316- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2317 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2318 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2319 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2320 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2321 Python exception ::
2322
2323 thread.error: can't start new thread
2324
2325 is raised now.
2326
2327- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2328 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2329 instead of from DLL teardown.
2330
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002331Mac
2332---
2333
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002334- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002335 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002336 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2337 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2338 the executable in the bundle.
2339
2340- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002341
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002342- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2343
2344- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2345 on Panther.
2346
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002347What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2348================================
2349
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002350*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002351
2352Core and builtins
2353-----------------
2354
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002355- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2356 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2357 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2358 with the -i option.
2359
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002360- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2361 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2362
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002363- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2364 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2365
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002366- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2367 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2368 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2369 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2370 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2371 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2372 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2373 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2374 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2375 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2376 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2377 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2378 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002379
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002380- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2381 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2382 embedded in a lambda expression.
2383
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002384- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2385 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2386 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2387 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2388 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2389
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002390- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2391 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2392 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2393
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002394- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2395 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2396
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002397- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2398 It's writable again.
2399
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002400- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2401 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2402 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002403 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002404
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002405- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2406 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2407 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2408
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002409Extension modules
2410-----------------
2411
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002412- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2413 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2414
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002415- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2416 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2417 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2418 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2419
2420- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2421 collection.
2422
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002423- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2424 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2425 unique within a single program run.
2426
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002427- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2428 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2429
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002430- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2431 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2432
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002433- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2434 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002435
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002436- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2437
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002438- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2439 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2440
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002441- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2442 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2443 for many BSD-derived systems.
2444
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002445
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002446Library
2447-------
2448
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002449- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2450 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2451 primary ones:
2452
2453 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2454 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2455 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2456
2457 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2458 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2459 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2460 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2461 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2462 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2463
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002464- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2465 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2466 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2467 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2468 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2469 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2470 argument.
2471
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002472- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2473 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2474 in the archive.
2475
2476- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2477 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2478
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002479- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2480 569574).
2481
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002482- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2483 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2484 no more.
2485
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002486- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2487 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2488 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2489 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2490 code coverage.
2491
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002492- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2493 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2494 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002495 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2496 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002497
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002498- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2499 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2500 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002501 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002502
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002503- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2504
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002505- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2506 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2507 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2508 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2509
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002510- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2511 handling.
2512
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002513- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2514 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2515
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002516- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2517 in socket.py.
2518
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002519- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2520
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002521- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2522 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2523 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2524 opener with proxy support.
2525
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002526- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2527
2528- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2529
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002530Tools/Demos
2531-----------
2532
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002533- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2534
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002535- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2536
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002537- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2538 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002539
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002540- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2541 files.
2542
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002543Build
2544-----
2545
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002546- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002547 different root directory.
2548
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002549C API
2550-----
2551
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002552- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2553 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2554 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2555 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2556 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2557 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2558 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2559 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2560 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2561 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2562
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002563- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2564 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2565 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2566 from Python.
2567
2568
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002569New platforms
2570-------------
2571
2572None this time.
2573
2574Tests
2575-----
2576
2577- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2578 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2579
2580Windows
2581-------
2582
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002583- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2584
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002585- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2586 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2587 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2588 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2589 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2590 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2591 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2592 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2593 that's what it's for.
2594
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002595Mac
2596---
2597
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002598- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2599 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2600 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2601 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002602- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2603 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2604- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002605
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002606SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2607------------------------------------
2608
2609430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2610598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2611622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2612661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2613683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2614697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2615713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2616724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2617727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2618729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2619730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2620731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2621732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2622733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2623735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2624740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2625744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2626745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2627747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2628749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2629751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2630753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2631755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2632757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2633760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2634
2635
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002636What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2637================================
2638
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002639*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002640
2641Core and builtins
2642-----------------
2643
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002644- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2645 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2646
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002647- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2648 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2649 and cannot be strings).
2650
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002651- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2652 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2653 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2654 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2655
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002656- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2657 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2658 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2659 Python itself.
2660
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002661- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2662 the referenced object, if it has one.
2663
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002664- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2665 the thread started at
2666 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2667
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002668- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2669 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2670 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2671 placed on a list index.
2672
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002673- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2674 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2675 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2676 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2677
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002678- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2679 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2680 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2681 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2682 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2683 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2684 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2685
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002686- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2687 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2688 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2689 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2690 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2691
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002692- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2693 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002694
2695- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2696 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2697 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2698 #693195.)
2699
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002700- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2701 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002702
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002703- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002704 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002705 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2706 interpreter executions, would fail.
2707
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002708- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002709 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002710 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002711
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002712Extension modules
2713-----------------
2714
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002715- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2716 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2717 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2718 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2719
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002720- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2721 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2722
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002723- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2724 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2725 and Greg Chapman.)
2726
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002727- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2728 recursively.
2729
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002730- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002731 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2732 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2733 leaks.
2734
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002735- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2736
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002737- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2738 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2739 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2740 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2741 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2742 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2743 #705836.
2744
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002745- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002746 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2747
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002748- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2749 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2750 See SF bug #692416.
2751
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002752- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2753 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2754
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002755- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2756 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2757 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002758
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002759- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002760 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2761 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2762
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002763- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2764 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2765 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2766 timeouts to work properly.
2767
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002768Library
2769-------
2770
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002771- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2772 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2773 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2774 future release.
2775
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002776- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2777 for querying platform dependent features.
2778
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002779- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002780
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002781- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2782 pickle protocol versions.
2783
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002784- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2785 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2786 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2787
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002788- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2789
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002790- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2791 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2792 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2793 modules.
2794
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002795- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2796 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2797 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2798
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002799- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2800 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2801
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002802- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2803 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2804 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2805
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002806- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002807 MS Office extensions.
2808
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002809- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2810 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2811
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002812- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2813 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2814
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002815- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2816 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2817 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2818 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2819 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2820 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2821
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002822- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2823 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2824 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002825
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002826- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2827 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2828 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2829
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002830- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2831
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002832- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2833 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2834 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2835
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002836Tools/Demos
2837-----------
2838
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002839- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2840 See the module docstring for details.
2841
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002842Build
2843-----
2844
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002845- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2846 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002847
2848C API
2849-----
2850
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002851- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2852
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002853- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2854 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2855 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2856
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002857- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2858 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002859
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002860 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2861 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2862 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002863
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002864- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002865 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2866
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002867- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2868 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2869 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002870
2871New platforms
2872-------------
2873
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002874None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002875
2876Tests
2877-----
2878
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002879- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2880 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002881
2882Windows
2883-------
2884
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002885- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2886 function.
2887
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002888- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2889 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002890
2891Mac
2892---
2893
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002894- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2895 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002896
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002897- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2898 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002899
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002900- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2901 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2902 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002903
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002904- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002905 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2906 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002907
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002908- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2909 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002910
2911
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002912What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2913=================================
2914
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002915*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002916
2917Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002918-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002919
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002920- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2921 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2922 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2923
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002924- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2925 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2926 (SF patch #664376.)
2927
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002928- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2929 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2930 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2931 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2932 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2933 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002934 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002935
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002936- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2937 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2938 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2939 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002940 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002941
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002942- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2943 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2944 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2945 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2946 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2947 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2948 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2949 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2950 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2951 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2952 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2953
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002954- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2955 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2956 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2957 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2958 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2959 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2960
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002961- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2962 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2963
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002964- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2965 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2966 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2967 case.)
2968
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002969- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2970 passed as unicode strings.
2971
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002972- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2973 See SF bug #683467.
2974
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002975- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2976 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2977
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002978- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2979
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002980- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2981
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002982- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2983 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2984 arguments.
2985
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002986- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2987 See SF bug #667147.
2988
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002989- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002990 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002991 See SF bug #676155.
2992
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002993- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002994 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002995 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2996 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2997 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2998 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2999 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3000 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003001
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003002Extension modules
3003-----------------
3004
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003005- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3006 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3007 tp_as_number pointer.
3008
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003009- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3010 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3011 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3012 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3013 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3014
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003015- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3016
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003017- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3018
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003019- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003020 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003021 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3022 patch #678531.)
3023
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003024- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3025 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3026
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003027- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3028 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3029
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003030- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3031
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003032- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3033 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3034 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3035
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003036- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3037
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003038- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3039 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3040
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003041- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003042
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003043- datetime changes:
3044
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003045 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3046
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003047 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3048 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3049 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3050 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3051 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3052 now.
3053
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003054 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003055 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3056 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003057
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003058 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003059 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003060 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3061 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3062 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3063 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003064
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003065 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3066 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3067 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003068 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3069
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003070 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3071 by a later example coded by Guido.
3072
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003073 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003074 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3075 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3076 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003077 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3078 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3079
3080 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3081 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3082 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3083 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3084 tzinfo subclass instance.
3085
3086 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3087 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3088 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3089 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3090 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3091 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3092 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3093 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003094
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003095 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3096 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3097 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3098 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3099 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003100 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3101
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003102 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003103
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003104 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3105 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3106 as a naive datetime object.
3107
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003108 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3109 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3110 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3111
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003112 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3113 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3114 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3115 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3116 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3117 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3118 comparison.
3119
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003120 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3121 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3122 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3123 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003124 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003125
3126 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003127
3128 and ::
3129
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003130 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3131
3132 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3133 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3134 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3135 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3136
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003137 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3138 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3139 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3140 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3141 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3142
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003143 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3144 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003145 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3146 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003147
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003148Library
3149-------
3150
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003151- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3152 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3153
3154- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3155 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3156 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3157 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3158 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3159 See PEP 307 for details.
3160
3161- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3162 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3163
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003164- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3165 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003166 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003167 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3168 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003169 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003170
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003171- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3172 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3173
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003174- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3175 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3176 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3177
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003178- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3179
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003180- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3181 exception.
3182
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003183- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3184 class.
3185
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003186- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3187 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3188 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3189
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003190- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3191 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3192
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003193- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003194 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3195 See SF bug #659228.
3196
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003197- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3198 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3199 See SF patch #651082.
3200
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003201- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003202
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003203- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3204 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3205
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003206- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003207 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003208
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003209- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3210 DOS paths from other platforms.
3211
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003212Tools/Demos
3213-----------
3214
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003215- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3216 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3217 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3218 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3219 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3220 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3221 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3222 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3223 example:
3224
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003225 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3226 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003227
3228 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3229
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003230
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003231Build
3232-----
3233
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003234- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3235 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3236 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003237 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3238
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003239 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3240
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003241- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3242 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3243 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3244 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3245 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3246 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3247 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3248 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3249 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3250
3251- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3252 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3253 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3254 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3255
3256- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3257 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3258
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003259C API
3260-----
3261
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003262- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3263 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003264
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003265- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3266 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3267 tp_as_number pointer.
3268
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003269- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3270 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3271 (SF #681367)
3272
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003273- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3274 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3275 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3276 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003277
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003278Tests
3279-----
3280
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003281- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003282 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3283 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3284 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3285 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3286 pydoc.)
3287
3288- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3289
3290- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003291
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003292Windows
3293-------
3294
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003295- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3296 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3297 time).
3298
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003299- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3300 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3301
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003302- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3303 release without strong cryptography.
3304
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003305- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003306 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003307
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003308- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3309 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3310
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003311Mac
3312---
3313
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003314- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3315 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003316
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003317- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3318 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3319 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003320
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003321- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3322 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003323
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003324- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3325 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3326 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3327 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003328
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003329- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003330 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3331 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3332 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003333
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003334
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003335What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003336=================================
3337
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003338*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003340Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003342
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003343- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3344
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003345- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3346 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003347 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003348 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003349 a different meaning than before.
3350
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003351- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003352 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003353 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003354
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003355- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003356 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003357 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003358
3359- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3360 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3361 and deallocation.
3362
3363- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3364 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3365
3366- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3367 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3368 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3369 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3370 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3371
3372- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3373 now detected by the garbage collector.
3374
3375- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3376 [SF bug 519621]
3377
3378- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3379 identifier.
3380
3381- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3382 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3383 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3384 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3385 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3386 [SF bug 563060]
3387
3388- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3389 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3390 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3391 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3392 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3393
3394- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3395 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3396 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3397
3398- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3399
3400- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3401 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3402 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3403 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3404 state of the slots would be lost.)
3405
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003406Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003408
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003409- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003410 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3411 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3412 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3413 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003414 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3415 Jython 2.1.
3416
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003417- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003418 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003419 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3420 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3421 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3422 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3423 these, see PEP 302.
3424
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003425- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3426 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3427 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3428
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003429- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3430 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3431 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3432
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003433- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3434 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3435 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3436
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003437- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3438 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3439 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3440 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3441 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3442 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3443 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3444 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3445 releases or implementations.
3446
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003447- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003448 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3449 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003450
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003451- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3452 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3453
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003454- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3455 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3456 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3457
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003458- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3459 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3460
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003461- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3462 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003463 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3464 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003465
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003466- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3467 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3468 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3469 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3470 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3471
3472 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3473 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3474 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3475 pattern.
3476
3477 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3478 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3479 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3480 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3481
3482 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3483 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3484 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3485 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3486 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3487 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3488
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003489- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3490 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3491 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3492 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3493 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3494 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3495 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3496 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003497
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003498- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3499 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3500 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3501 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3502 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003503 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3504 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3505 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3506 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3507 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3508 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3509 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003510
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003511- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3512 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3513
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003514- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3515 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3516 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3517 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3518 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3519 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3520 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3521 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3522 to Zack Weinberg!
3523
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003524- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3525 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3526 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3527 type. This has been fixed now.
3528
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003529- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3530 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3531 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3532
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003533- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3534 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3535 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3536 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3537 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3538 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3539 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3540 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003541 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003542
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003543- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3544 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3545 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003546
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003547- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3548 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3549 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3550 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3551 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3552 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3553 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3554 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003555 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003556 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3557 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3558
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003559- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3560 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3561 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3562 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3563 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3564 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3565 this.)
3566
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003567- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3568 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003569 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003570 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003571 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3572 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003573 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3574 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003575
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003576- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3577 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3578 currently running.
3579
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003580- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3581 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3582 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3583 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3584
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003585- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3586 as directory names.
3587
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003588- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3589 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3590
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003591- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3592 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3593
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003594- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003595 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3596 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003597
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003598- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3599 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3600 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3601 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3602 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3603
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003604- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3605 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3606 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3607 removed.
3608
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003609- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3610 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3611 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3612
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003613- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3614 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3615 to __debug__.
3616
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003617- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3618 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3619 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3620
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003621- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3622 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3623 deprecated now.
3624
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003625- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3626 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3627 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003628
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003629- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3630 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3631 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3632 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3633 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003634
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003635- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3636 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3637
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003638- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3639 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3640 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003641 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003642 is backward compatible.
3643
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003644- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3645 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3646 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3647 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3648 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3649
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003650- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3651 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3652 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3653 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3654 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3655 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003656
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003657- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3658 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3659
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003660- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3661 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3662
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003663- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3664 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3665 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3666 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3667 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3668
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003669- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3670 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3671 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3672
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003673- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003674 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3675
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003676- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3677 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3678 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003679
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003680- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3681 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3682
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003683- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3684 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3685 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3686
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003687- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3688
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003689Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003691
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003692- Added three operators to the operator module:
3693 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3694 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3695 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3696
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003697- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3698
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003699- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3700 archives.
3701
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003702- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3703 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3704 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3705
3706 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3707
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003708- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3709 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3710 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003711 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003712
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003713- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3714 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3715 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3716 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003717 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3718 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3719 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3720 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003721
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003722- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3723 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003724
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003725- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3726
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003727- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3728 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3729
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003730- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3731 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3732 supported.
3733
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003734- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3735
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003736- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3737 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003738
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003739- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3740 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3741
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003742- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3743
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003744- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3745 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3746
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003747- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3748 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3749 functions but callable type objects.
3750
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003751- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003752 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003753 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003754
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003755- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3756 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003757
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003758- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3759 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003760
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003761- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3762 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3763 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3764 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3765
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003766- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3767 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003768
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003769- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3770 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3771 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3772 and __imul__.
3773
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003774- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003775 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3776 is called.
3777
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003778- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3779 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3780 interpreter was compiled.
3781
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003782- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3783 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3784 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003785 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003786 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3787 1, not 2.
3788
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003789- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3790 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3791 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3792 limit.
3793
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003794- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3795 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3796 bug #623464.
3797
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003798- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3799 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3800 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3801 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3802
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003803Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003805
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003806- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3807
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003808- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3809 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3810 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3811 with Python 2.3a2.
3812
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003813- os.path exposes getctime.
3814
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003815- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003816 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003817 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003818 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003819 unit tests of floating point results.
3820
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003821- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3822 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3823 has been increased.
3824
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003825- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3826 executed.
3827
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003828- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3829 postinstallation script.
3830
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003831- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3832 test the current module.
3833
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003834- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003835 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3836 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3837 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3838 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3839
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003840- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003841 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003842 Ward's Optik package.
3843
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003844- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3845 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3846 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3847 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3848
3849- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3850 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003851 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003852
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003853- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3854 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3855 shelf are binary pickles.
3856
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003857- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3858 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3859
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003860- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3861 modules are iterators now.
3862
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003863- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3864 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3865 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3866 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3867 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3868 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003869
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003870- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3871 with their entity value.
3872
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003873- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3874
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003875- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3876 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003877
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003878- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3879 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003880 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003881
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003882- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3883 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3884 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3885 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3886 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3887 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3888 main():
3889
3890 import locale
3891 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3892
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003893- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3894 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3895
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003896- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3897 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3898 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3899 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3900 to the new standard.
3901
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003902- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3903 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3904 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3905 an extension to the database.
3906
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003907- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3908 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3909 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3910 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003911 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003912
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003913- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003914 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003915
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003916- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3917 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3918 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3919 bounded integers.
3920
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003921- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3922 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3923 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3924 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3925 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3926 in existence.
3927
3928 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3929 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3930 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3931 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3932 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3933 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3934
3935 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3936 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3937 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3938 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3939
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003940- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3941 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3942 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3943
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003944- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3945
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003946- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3947 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3948 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3949 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3950
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003951- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3952 argument.
3953
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003954- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3955 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3956 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3957 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3958 [SF patch 560794].
3959
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003960- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3961 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3962 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003963 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3964 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3965 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003966
3967- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3968 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003969
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003970- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3971 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3972 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3973 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003974
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003975- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3976 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3977 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3978 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3979 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3980
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003981- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003982
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003983- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3984
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003985- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3986 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3987 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3988 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3989 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3990 identical to None.
3991
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003992- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3993 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3994 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3995 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3996 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3997 results now.
3998
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003999- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4000 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4001
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004002- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4003 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4004 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4005 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4006 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4007 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4008 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4009 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4010
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004011- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4012
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004013- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4014 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4015
4016- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4017 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4018 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4019 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4020 and other systems.
4021
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004022- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4023 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4024 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4025 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 +00004026 work well with these.
4027
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004028- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4029
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004030- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004031 connections.
4032
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004033- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4034 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4035 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4036
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004037- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4038 sets
4039
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004040- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4041 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4042 name.
4043
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004044- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4045 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4046 passed in.
4047
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004048- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004049 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004050 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4051 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004052
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004053- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4054
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004055- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4056
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004057- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4058 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4059 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4060
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004061- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4062 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4063 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4064 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004065 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004066
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004067- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004068 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004069 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004070
4071- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4072 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4073 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4074
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004075- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004076 the value of its expression argument.
4077
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004078- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4079 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4080 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4081
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004082- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4083 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4084 skipstone browser was included.
4085
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004086- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4087 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4088
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004089Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004091
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004092- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4093 names in addition to accepting file names.
4094
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004095- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4096 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4097 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4098 still used and useful.)
4099
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004100- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4101 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4102 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4103 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004104
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004105- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4106 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4107 the generated binary.
4108
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004109Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004111
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004112- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4113
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004114- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4115 except in the hands of experts.
4116
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004117- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004118 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4119 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4120 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004121
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004122- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4123 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4124 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4125 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4126 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4127 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4128 builds.
4129
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004130- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4131 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4132 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4133 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4134 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4135 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4136 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4137 new type.
4138
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004139- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004140
4141 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4142 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4143 positive infinities.
4144
4145 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4146 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4147 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4148 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4149 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4150 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4151 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4152
4153 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4154
4155 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4156
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004157- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4158 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4159 size of the executable.
4160
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004161- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4162 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4163 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4164 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004165
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004166- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4167
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004168- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4169 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4170 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004171
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004172- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4173 well as Unix.
4174
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004175- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4176 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4177 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4178 modules in the README file for details.
4179
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004180C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004182
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004183- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4184 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004185 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004186 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004187 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004188
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004189- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4190 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4191 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4192 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4193 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4194 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004195 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004196 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4197 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4198 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4199 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4200 aligned.)
4201
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004202- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4203 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4204 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4205
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004206- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4207 level.
4208
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004209- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4210 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4211 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4212 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4213 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4214
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004215- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4216 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4217 code.
4218
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004219- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4220 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4221 adjusting for negative indices.
4222
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004223- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4224 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4225 object.
4226
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004227- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4228 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4229 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4230
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004231- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4232 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004233
4234- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4235
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004236- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4237 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4238 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4239 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4240
4241- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4242
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004243- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004244
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004245- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004246 without going through the buffer API.
4247
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004249
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004250- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4251 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4252 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4253 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4254
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004255- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4256 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4257
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004258- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004259 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4260
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004261New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004263
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004264- OpenVMS is now supported.
4265
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004266- AtheOS is now supported.
4267
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004268- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4269
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004270- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004272Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-----
4274
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004275- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4276 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4277 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004278
4279Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004281
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004282- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4283 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4284 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4285 bugs.
4286 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004287 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004288 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4289 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004290 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004291
4292- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004293 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004294
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004295- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4296 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4297
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004298- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4299 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004300 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004301 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4302
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004303- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4304 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4305 use files" uninstall option).
4306
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004307- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4308
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004309- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4310 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4311
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004312- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4313 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4314 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4315
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004316- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4317 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4318 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4319 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4320 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004321 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4322 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4323 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004324
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004325- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004326 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004327 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4328 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4329 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4330 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4331 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4332 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4333 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4334 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4335 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4336 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4337 work around.
4338
4339- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4340 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4341 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4342 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4343 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4344 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4345 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4346 specified with O_CREAT too).
4347
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004348Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349----
4350
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004351- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004352
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004353- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4354 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4355 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4356
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004357- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4358 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4359 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4360
4361- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4362 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4363 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4364 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4365 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4366 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4367 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4368 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004369
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004370- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4371 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4372 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004373
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004374- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4375 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4376 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4377 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4378 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004379
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004380- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4381 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4382 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004383
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004384- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4385 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004386
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004387- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4388 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4389 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4390 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4391 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004392
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004393- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4394 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4395 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4396
4397- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4398 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4399 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004400
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004401- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4402 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4403 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4404 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004405 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004406
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004407- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4408 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004409
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004410- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4411 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004412
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004413- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004414 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004415 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4416 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004417
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004418
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004419What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004420===============================
4421
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4423
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004424Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004426
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004427- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4428 with a custom metaclass.
4429
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004430Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004432
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004433- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4434 are proxies.
4435
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004436Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004438
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004439- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4440 very short strings.
4441
4442- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4443 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4444 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4445 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4446 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4447
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004448Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004450
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004451- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4452 close or delete time).
4453
4454- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4455 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4456
4457- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4458
4459- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004460 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004461
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004462Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004464
4465Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004467
4468C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004470
4471New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473
4474Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476
4477Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004479
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004480- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4481
4482- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4483 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4484
4485- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4486 deleted at process exit time.
4487
4488- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4489 in backslash.
4490
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004491Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004493
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004494- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4495 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4496 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4497
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004498
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004499What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004500===========================
4501
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4503
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004504Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004506
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004507- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4508 been extensively updated. See
4509
4510 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4511
4512 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4513
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004514- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4515 deleted!
4516
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004517- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4518 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4519 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4520 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4521 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4522
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004523- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4524
4525 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4526 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4527
4528 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4529 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4530 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4531 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4532 supported anyway.
4533
4534 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4535 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4536
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004537- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4538 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4539 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4540 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4541 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004542
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004543- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4544 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4545 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4546
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004547Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004549
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004550- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4551 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4552 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4553 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4554 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4555 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004556 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4557 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4558 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4559 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004560
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004561- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4562 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4563 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4564
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004565Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004567
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004568- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4569
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004570Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004572
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004573- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4574 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4575 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4576 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4577 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4578 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4579
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004580- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4581
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004582- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4583
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004584- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4585
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004586- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4587 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4588 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4589
4590- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4591
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004592Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004594
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004595- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4596 off a search on Google.
4597
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004600
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004601- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4602 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4603 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4604 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4605 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4606 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4607 other platforms should do likewise.
4608
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004609- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4610 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4611 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4612
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004613C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004615
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004616- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4617 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4618 producing key-value pairs.
4619
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004620- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004621 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004622 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4623 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4624 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4625 previously went unchallenged.
4626
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004627New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004629
4630Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004632
4633Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004635
4636Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004638
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004639- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4640 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004641
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004642- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4643 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4644 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4645 home.
4646
4647
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004648What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004649===========================
4650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4652
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004653Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004656- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4657 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004658
4659 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004660 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004661
4662 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4663 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004664 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004665 This needs to be documented.
4666
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004667- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4668 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4669
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004670- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4671 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4672 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4673
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004674- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4675 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4676
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004677- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4678 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4679 class forbids it).
4680
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004681- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4682 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4683 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4684
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004685- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4686
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004687Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004689
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004690- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4691 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004692 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004693
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004694- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4695 (like 1 + '').
4696
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004697Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004699
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004700- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4701 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4702 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4703 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004704 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004705 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4706
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004707- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4708 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4709 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4710 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4711
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004712- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4713 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004714 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4715 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4716 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004717
4718- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4719 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004720
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004721- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4722 bytes on its input.
4723
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004724Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004726
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004727- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004728 convenience function.
4729
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004730- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4731 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4732 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004733 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4734 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4735 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4736 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4737 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4738 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004739
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004740- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4741 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4742 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4743 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4744
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004745- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4746 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4747 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4748
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004749- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4750 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4751 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4752 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4753
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004754- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4755 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004757 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4758 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4759 new -l and -e options.
4760
4761- statcache is now deprecated.
4762
4763- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4764 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004766 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4767 time properly taken into account.
4768
4769- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4770 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4771 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4772 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4773
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004774Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004776
4777Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004779
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004780- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4781 is built with libdb3 if available.
4782
4783- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4784
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004785C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004787
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004788- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4789 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4790 PySequence_Size().
4791
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004792- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4793
4794- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4795 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4796 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4797
4798- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4799 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4800
4801- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4802 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4803
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004804New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004806
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004807- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4808 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4809
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004810- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4811 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4812
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004813- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4814
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004815Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004817
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004818- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4819 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4820
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004821Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004823
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004824Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004826
4827- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4828 removed completely in the next release.
4829
4830- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4831 OSX.
4832
4833- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4834 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4835
4836- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4837
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004838
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004839What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004840===========================
4841
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4843
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004844Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004846
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004847- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004848 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004849 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004850 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4851 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004852 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4853 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004854 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4855 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004856
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004857- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4858 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4859
4860- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4861 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4862
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004863Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004865
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004866- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4867 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4868 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4869 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4870 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4871 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4872 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4873 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4874
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004875- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4876 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4877 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4878 example).
4879
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004880- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004881 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004882 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004883 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004884
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004885- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4886 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4887 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004888 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004889
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004890- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4891 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4892 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4893 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4894 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4895 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4896
4897 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4898
4899 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4900
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004901Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004903
4904- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4905
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004906- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4907
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004908- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4909 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004910
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004911- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4912 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4913 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4914 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4915 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4916 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004917 attributes.
4918
4919- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4920 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4921 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004922
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004923- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4924 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4925 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004926
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004927- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4928 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4929 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004930 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4931 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4932
4933- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4934 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004935
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004936Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004938
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004939- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4940 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4941
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004942- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4943 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4944 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4945 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4946
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004947- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4948 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4949 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4950 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4951
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004952 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4953 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4954 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4955 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4956 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4957 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4958 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4959 without losing information).
4960
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004961- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004962 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4963 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4964 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4965 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4966 module).
4967
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004968 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004969 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4970 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4971 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4972 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004973
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004974- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004975 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4976 encoding.
4977
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004978- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4979 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4980
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004981- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004982 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4983
4984- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4985 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4986 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4987 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4988
4989- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4990
4991- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4992 ON, and OFF.
4993
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004994- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4995 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4996
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004997Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004999
5000- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5001 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5002 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005003
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005004- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5005 been added: -X and -E.
5006
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005007Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005009
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005010- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5011 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5012
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005013C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005015
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005016- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5017 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5018 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5019 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5020 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5021
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005022- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5023 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5024 as long) arguments.
5025
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005026- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5027 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5028 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5029 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5030 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5031 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5032
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005033- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5034 input.
5035
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005036New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005038
5039Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005041
5042Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005044
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005045- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5046 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5047 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5048
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005049- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5050 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5051 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005052 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005053
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5055 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5056 import signal
5057 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005058
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005060 while 1:
5061 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005063 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5064 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5065 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5066 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005067
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005068
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005069What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5070===========================
5071
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5073
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005074Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005075--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005076
5077- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5078 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5079 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5080
5081- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5082 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5083 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5084 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5085 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5086 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5087 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005088
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005089- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005090 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005091 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5092 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5093 associate a docstring with a property.
5094
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005095- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5096 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5097 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5098 other built-in object types.
5099
5100- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5101 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5102 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5103 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5104 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5105
5106- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5107 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5108
5109- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5110 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005111 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005112 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5113 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5114 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5115 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5116 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5117
5118- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5119 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5120 class.
5121
5122- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5123 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5124 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5125 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5126
5127- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5128 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5129 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5130 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5131
5132- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5133 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5134
5135- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5136 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5137 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5138 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5139 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005140 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005141 with the same value as s.
5142
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005143- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5144
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005145Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005146----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005147
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005148- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5149
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005150- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5151 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5152 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5153 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5154 objects.
5155
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005156- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5157 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005158 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5159 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5160
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005161- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5162 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5163 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5164
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005165Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005167
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005168- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5169 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5170 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5171 by the instances.
5172
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005173- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5174 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5175 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5176
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005177- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5178 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5179 before the entire comparison is complete.
5180
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005181- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5182 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5183 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5184
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005185- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5186 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5187 getwriter().
5188
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005189- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5190 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5191
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005192- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005193 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5194 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5195
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005196- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5197 iterable object.
5198
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005199- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5200 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005201
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005202- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5203 authentication.
5204
5205- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5206 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005207
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005208- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005209 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5210 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5211 a sample driver.)
5212
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005213Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005215
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005216- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5217 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5218 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5219 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5220 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5221 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5222 kernel has large file support.
5223
5224- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5225 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5226 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5227 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5228 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5229
5230- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5231 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5232 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5233
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005236
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005237- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5238 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5239
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005240New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005242
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005243- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5244 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5245
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005246Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005247-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005248
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005249- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5250 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5251 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5252 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5253 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5254
5255- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5256 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5257 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5258 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5259
5260- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5261 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5262
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005263Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005265
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005266- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005267 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5268 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005269
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005270
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005271What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5272===========================
5273
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5275
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005276Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005278
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005279- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5280 big to represent as a C double.
5281
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005282- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5283 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5284 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5285 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5286 restriction).
5287
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005288- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5289 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5290 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5291 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5292 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5293
5294 >>> dir([])
5295 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5296 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5297 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5298 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5299 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5300 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5301 'reverse', 'sort']
5302
5303 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5304
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005305- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005306 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5307 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5308 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5309 OverflowError exception.
5310
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005311- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005312 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005313 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5314 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5315 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5316 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5317 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005318 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5320 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5321
5322 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5323 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5324 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5325 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005326
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005327- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005328 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5329 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5330 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5331 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5332 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5333 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5334 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5335 once it is created.
5336
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005337- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5338 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5339 (key, value) pairs.
5340
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005341- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005342 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5343 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5344
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005345- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5346 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5347 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5348 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5349 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005350
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005351- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005352 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5353 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5354
5355 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5356
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005357- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005358 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5359
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005360Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005361-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005362
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005363- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005364 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5365 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005366
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005367- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5368 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5369 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5370 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5371 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5372 in this area anymore).
5373
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005374- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5375 threading.Timer.
5376
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005377- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5378 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5379
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005380- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005381 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5382
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005383- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005384 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5385 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5386 converted to Python longs.
5387
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005388- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005389 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5390
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005391- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5392 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5393 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5394
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005395Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005397
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005398- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5399 division operators as per PEP 238.
5400
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005401Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005403
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005404- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5405 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5406 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5407 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5408
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005409C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005410-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005411
5412- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005413
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005414- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5415 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005416 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5419 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005420 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005422
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005423- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005424 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5425 module:
5426
5427 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005428
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005429 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5430 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005431
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005432 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5433 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005434
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005435 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5436
5437 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5438
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005439- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005440 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5441 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5442 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005443
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005444New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005446
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005447- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5448 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5449 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5450 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5451 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005452
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005453Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005455
5456Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005458
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005459- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5460 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5461 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5462 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005463 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5464 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5465 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5466 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5467 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005468
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005469- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005470 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5471
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005472
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005473What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5474===========================
5475
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005476*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5477
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005478Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005479-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005480
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005481- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5482 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5483
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005484- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5485 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5486 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005487
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005488- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5489 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5490 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5491 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005492
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005493- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005496
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005497Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005499
5500- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005501 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005502 the module docstring for details.
5503
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005504Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005506
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005507- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005508 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5509 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5510 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005511
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005512- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5513 Nick Mathewson.
5514
5515Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005516----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005517
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005518- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5519 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5520 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5521 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5522 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5523 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5524 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5525 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5526
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005527- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5528 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5529 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5530 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5531
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005532- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5533 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5534 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5535 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5536 come a long way).
5537
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005538- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5539 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5540 write filters for these warnings).
5541
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005542- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5543 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5544 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5545 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5546 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5547
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005548- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5549 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5550 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5551 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5552 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5553 older distribution.
5554
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005555Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005556-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005557
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005558- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5559 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005560 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005561
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005562- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5563 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5564 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5565
5566- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5567
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005568- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5569
5570- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5571
5572- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5573
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005574- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005575
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005576- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5577
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005578New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005580
5581C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005583
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005584- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5585 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5586 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5587 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5588 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5589 against buffer overruns.
5590
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005591- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005592 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5593 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005594 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5595 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5596 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5597
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005598- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5599 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5600 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5601 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5602 deprecated.
5603
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005604Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005606
5607- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5608 relevant is found.
5609
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005610
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005611What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005612===========================
5613
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5615
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005616Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005618
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005619- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5620 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5621 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5622 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5623 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5624 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5625 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5626 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005627 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005628 repaired.
5629
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005630- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005631 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005632 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5633 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5634 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5635 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5636 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5637 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5638 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5639 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5640
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005641- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5642 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5643 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5644 leading BMO character).
5645
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005646- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5647 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5648 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5649
5650 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5651 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5652 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005653
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005654 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5655 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5656 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5657 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5658 for various simple to use conversions.
5659
5660 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5661 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5662
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005663 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5664 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5665 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5666 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5667 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5668 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5669 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5670 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5671 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5672 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5673 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5674 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5675 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5676 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5677 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005678
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005679- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5680 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5681 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005682 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005683 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005684
5685 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005686 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5687 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5688 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5689 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5690 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005691 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5692 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005693
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005694 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5695 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5696 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005697 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005698
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005699- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5700 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5701 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5702 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5703 floating arithmetic,
5704
5705 x = 9007199254740992.0
5706 print long(x)
5707
5708 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5709 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5710 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5711 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5712 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5713 functions are of good quality).
5714
5715 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5716 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5717 algorithms to break.
5718
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005719- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5720 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5721 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5722 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5723 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5724 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5725 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5726 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5727 order.
5728
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005729- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5730 operation along the most common code paths.
5731
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005732- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5733 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5734
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005735- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5736 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5737 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5738 {}.update(UserDict())
5739
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005740- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5741 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5742 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5743 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5744 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5745 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5746 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5747 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5748
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005749- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005750 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005751
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005752 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005753 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5754 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005755 join() method of strings
5756 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005757 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5758 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005760 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005761
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005762- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5763 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5764
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005765- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5766 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5767
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005768- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5769 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5770 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5771 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5772
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005773- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5774 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005775 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005776 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5777 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005778
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005779- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5780
5781
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005782Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005783-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005784
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005785- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005786 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005787 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5788 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5789
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005790- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5791 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5792
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005793- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5794 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5795 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5796 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5797
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005798- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5799 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5800 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5801
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005802- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5803
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005804- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5805
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005806- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5807 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5808 that are still imported into string.py).
5809
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005810- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5811
5812- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5813 Now it does.
5814
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005815- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5816
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005817- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5818 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5819 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5820 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5821 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005822 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5823 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005824
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005825- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5826 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5827 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5828 'help(object)'.
5829
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005830Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005831-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005832
5833- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005834 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005835 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5836 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5837
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005838- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005839 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5840 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005841
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005842C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005843-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005844
5845- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5846 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005847
5848----
5849
5850**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**