blob: ce9d779e2d5cd09bc8dfe22dfa996387fbc7ecac [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000015- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
16 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
17 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
18 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
19 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
20 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
21 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
22 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
23
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000024- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
25 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
26 character other than a space.
27
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000028- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
29 by the function object or by the method object, the function
30 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
31 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
32 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
33 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
34 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
35 attributes with the same name.
36
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000037- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
38 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
39 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
40 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
41 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
42 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
43 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
44 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
45 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
46 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
47 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
48 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
49 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
50 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000051
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000052- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
53 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
54 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
55 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
56 This has been repaired.
57
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000058- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
59
60- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
61
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000062- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
63 over a sequence.
64
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000065- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
66
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000067- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
68 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
69 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
70 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
71 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
72 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
73 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
74 records with equal keys is unchanged).
75
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000076- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
77 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000078
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000079- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
80 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
81 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
82
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000083- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
84 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
85 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
86 freelist.
87
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000088- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
89 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
90
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000091- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
92 number.
93
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000094- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
95 a TypeError exception.
96
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000097- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
98 820195.
99
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000100- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
101 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
102 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
103
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000104Extension modules
105-----------------
106
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000107- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
108
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000109- os.getsid was added.
110
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000111- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
112 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
113 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
114
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000115- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
116
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000117- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
118
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000119- readline.clear_history was added.
120
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000121- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
122
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000123- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
124
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000125- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
126
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000127- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
128
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000129- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
130
131- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
132
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000133- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
134
135- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
136
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000137- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
138 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
139 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
140
141- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
142 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
143 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
144 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
145 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
146 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
147 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
148
149- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
150 iterators from a single iterable.
151
152- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
153 of raising a TypeError exception.
154
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000155Library
156-------
157
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000158- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
159 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
160
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000161- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
162
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000163- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
164
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000165- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
166
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000167- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
168 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
169
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000170- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
171
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000172- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
173 a string).
174
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000175- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
176
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000177- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
178
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000179- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
180
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000181- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
182
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000183- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
184 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
185 list of fieldnames.
186
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000187- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
188 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
189
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000190- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
191
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000192- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
193 empty lists.
194
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000195- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
196 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
197 and shelves.
198
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000199- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
200 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
201
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000202- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000203 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
204 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000205
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000206- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
207 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000208 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000209
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000210- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000211 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
212 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
213
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000214- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
215 and removed in Py2.4.
216
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000217- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
218
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000219Tools/Demos
220-----------
221
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000222- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
223
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000224- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
225 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
226 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
227 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
228
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000229- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
230
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000231- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
232 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
233 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
234 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
235 now.
236
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000237- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
238 in effect
239
240- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
241 C-c C-h
242
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000243- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
244 -d option was given.
245
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000246Build
247-----
248
249C API
250-----
251
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000252- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
253 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
254 about 10% faster.
255
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000256- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
257 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
258
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000259- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
260 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
261 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
262 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
263
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000264New platforms
265-------------
266
267Tests
268-----
269
270Windows
271-------
272
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000273- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
274 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
275 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
276 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
277
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000278- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
279 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
280 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
281
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000282Mac
283----
284
285
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000286What's New in Python 2.3 final?
287===============================
288
289*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
290
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000291IDLE
292----
293
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000294- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
295 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
296 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
297 context-menu actions.
298
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000299- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
300 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
301 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
302 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
303 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
304 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
305 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
306 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
307 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
308
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000309
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000310What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
311=============================================
312
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000313*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000314
315Core and builtins
316-----------------
317
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000318- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000319 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000320 comment at the end are still unsupported.
321
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000322Extension modules
323-----------------
324
325- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
326 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
327 than once. This has been fixed.
328
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000329- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
330 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
331 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
332 call.
333
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000334- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
335
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000336Library
337-------
338
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000339- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
340 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
341
342- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
343 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
344 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
345 restored.
346
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000347IDLE
348----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000349
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000350- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000351
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000352Build
353-----
354
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000355- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
356 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
357
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000358C API
359-----
360
361Windows
362-------
363
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000364- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
365 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
366
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000367- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
368
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000369Mac
370---
371
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000372- Various fixes to pimp.
373
374- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
375
376- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
377 more problems than it solves.
378
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000379
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000380What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
381=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000382
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000383*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
384
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000385Core and builtins
386-----------------
387
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000388- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
389 by sys.setcheckinterval().
390
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000391- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
392 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000393 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000394
395- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
396 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
397 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000398 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000399
400- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
401 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000402
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000403- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
404 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
405 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
406
407- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000408 770247.
409
410- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000411
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000412Extension modules
413-----------------
414
415- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
416 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
417
418- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
419
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000420- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
421
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000422- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
423 contained within the _strptime module.
424
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000425- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
426 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
427
428- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000429 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
430
431- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
432 the find_class attribute, if present.
433
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000434- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000435
436 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
437 (SF bug 763298).
438
439 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000440 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
441 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
442 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000443
444 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
445
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000446Library
447-------
448
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000449- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
450
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000451- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
452 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
453 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
454 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
455 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
456 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
457 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
458 or Tester().
459
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000460- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
461 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
462 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
463 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
464 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
465 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
466 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
467 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
468 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000469
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000470 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000471
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000472- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
473 weren't before was an oversight.
474
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000475- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
476 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
477
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000478- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
479 when there are no lines.
480
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000481- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
482 which could occur with Tk 8.4
483
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000484- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
485 to child processes.
486
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000487- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
488
489- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
490
491- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
492 xmlrpclib.
493
494- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
495 responses.
496
497- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
498 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
499
500- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
501 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
502 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
503
504- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
505 used as patterns.
506
507- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
508 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
509 than Tk 8.3.
510
511- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
512
513- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000514
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000515Tools/Demos
516-----------
517
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000518- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
519
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000520- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
521
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000522- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000523
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000524Build
525-----
526
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000527- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
528
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000529- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
530
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000531- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
532 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000533
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000534- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
535 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
536 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000537
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000538C API
539-----
540
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000541- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
542 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
543
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000544Windows
545-------
546
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000547- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
548 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
549 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
550 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
551 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
552 Python exception ::
553
554 thread.error: can't start new thread
555
556 is raised now.
557
558- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
559 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
560 instead of from DLL teardown.
561
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000562Mac
563---
564
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000565- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000566 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000567 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
568 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
569 the executable in the bundle.
570
571- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000572
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000573- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
574
575- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
576 on Panther.
577
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000578What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
579================================
580
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000581*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000582
583Core and builtins
584-----------------
585
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000586- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
587 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
588 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
589 with the -i option.
590
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000591- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
592 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
593
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000594- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
595 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
596
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000597- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
598 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
599 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
600 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
601 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
602 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
603 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
604 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
605 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
606 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
607 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
608 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
609 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000610
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000611- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
612 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
613 embedded in a lambda expression.
614
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000615- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
616 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
617 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
618 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
619 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
620
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000621- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
622 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
623 matches the restriction on classic classes.
624
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000625- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
626 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
627
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000628- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
629 It's writable again.
630
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000631- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
632 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
633 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000634 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000635
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000636- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
637 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
638 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
639
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000640Extension modules
641-----------------
642
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000643- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
644 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
645
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000646- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
647 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
648 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
649 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
650
651- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
652 collection.
653
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000654- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
655 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
656 unique within a single program run.
657
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000658- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
659 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
660
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000661- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
662 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
663
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000664- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
665 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000666
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000667- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
668
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000669- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
670 Fixes SF bug #730685.
671
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000672- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
673 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
674 for many BSD-derived systems.
675
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000676
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000677Library
678-------
679
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000680- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
681 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
682 primary ones:
683
684 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
685 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
686 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
687
688 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
689 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
690 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
691 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
692 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
693 framework features (which doctest lacks).
694
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000695- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
696 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
697 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
698 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
699 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
700 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
701 argument.
702
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000703- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
704 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
705 in the archive.
706
707- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
708 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
709
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000710- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
711 569574).
712
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000713- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
714 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
715 no more.
716
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000717- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
718 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
719 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
720 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
721 code coverage.
722
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000723- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
724 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
725 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000726 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
727 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000728
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000729- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
730 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
731 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000732 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000733
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000734- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
735
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000736- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
737 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
738 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
739 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
740
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000741- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
742 handling.
743
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000744- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
745 __doc__ of data descriptors.
746
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000747- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
748 in socket.py.
749
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000750- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
751
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000752- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
753 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
754 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
755 opener with proxy support.
756
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000757- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
758
759- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
760
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000761Tools/Demos
762-----------
763
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000764- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
765
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000766- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
767
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000768- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
769 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000770
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000771- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
772 files.
773
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000774Build
775-----
776
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000777- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000778 different root directory.
779
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000780C API
781-----
782
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000783- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
784 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
785 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
786 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
787 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
788 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
789 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
790 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
791 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
792 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
793
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000794- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
795 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
796 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
797 from Python.
798
799
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000800New platforms
801-------------
802
803None this time.
804
805Tests
806-----
807
808- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
809 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
810
811Windows
812-------
813
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000814- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
815
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000816- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
817 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
818 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
819 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
820 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
821 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
822 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
823 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
824 that's what it's for.
825
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000826Mac
827---
828
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000829- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
830 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
831 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
832 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000833- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
834 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
835- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000836
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000837SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
838------------------------------------
839
840430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
841598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
842622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
843661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
844683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
845697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
846713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
847724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
848727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
849729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
850730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
851731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
852732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
853733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
854735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
855740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
856744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
857745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
858747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
859749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
860751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
861753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
862755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
863757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
864760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
865
866
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000867What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
868================================
869
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000870*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000871
872Core and builtins
873-----------------
874
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000875- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
876 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
877
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000878- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
879 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
880 and cannot be strings).
881
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000882- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
883 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
884 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
885 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
886
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000887- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
888 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
889 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
890 Python itself.
891
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000892- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
893 the referenced object, if it has one.
894
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000895- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
896 the thread started at
897 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
898
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000899- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
900 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
901 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
902 placed on a list index.
903
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000904- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
905 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
906 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
907 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
908
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000909- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
910 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
911 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
912 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
913 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
914 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
915 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
916
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000917- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
918 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
919 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
920 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
921 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
922
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000923- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
924 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000925
926- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
927 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
928 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
929 #693195.)
930
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000931- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
932 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000933
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000934- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000935 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000936 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
937 interpreter executions, would fail.
938
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000939- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000940 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000941 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000942
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000943Extension modules
944-----------------
945
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000946- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
947 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
948 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
949 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
950
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000951- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
952 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
953
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000954- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
955 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
956 and Greg Chapman.)
957
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000958- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
959 recursively.
960
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000961- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000962 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
963 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
964 leaks.
965
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000966- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
967
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000968- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
969 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
970 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
971 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
972 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
973 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
974 #705836.
975
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000976- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000977 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
978
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000979- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
980 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
981 See SF bug #692416.
982
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000983- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
984 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
985
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000986- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
987 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
988 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000989
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000990- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000991 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
992 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
993
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000994- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
995 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
996 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
997 timeouts to work properly.
998
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000999Library
1000-------
1001
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001002- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1003 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1004 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1005 future release.
1006
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001007- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1008 for querying platform dependent features.
1009
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001010- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001011
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001012- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1013 pickle protocol versions.
1014
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001015- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1016 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1017 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1018
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001019- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1020
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001021- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1022 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1023 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1024 modules.
1025
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001026- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1027 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1028 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1029
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001030- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1031 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1032
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001033- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1034 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1035 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1036
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001037- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001038 MS Office extensions.
1039
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001040- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1041 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1042
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001043- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1044 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1045
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001046- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1047 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1048 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1049 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1050 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1051 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1052
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001053- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1054 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1055 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001056
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001057- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1058 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1059 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1060
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001061- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1062
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001063- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1064 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1065 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1066
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001067Tools/Demos
1068-----------
1069
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001070- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1071 See the module docstring for details.
1072
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001073Build
1074-----
1075
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001076- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1077 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001078
1079C API
1080-----
1081
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001082- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1083
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001084- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1085 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1086 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1087
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001088- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1089 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001090
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001091 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1092 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1093 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001094
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001095- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001096 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1097
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001098- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1099 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1100 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001101
1102New platforms
1103-------------
1104
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001105None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001106
1107Tests
1108-----
1109
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001110- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1111 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001112
1113Windows
1114-------
1115
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001116- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1117 function.
1118
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001119- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1120 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001121
1122Mac
1123---
1124
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001125- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1126 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001127
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001128- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1129 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001130
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001131- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1132 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1133 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001134
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001135- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001136 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1137 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001138
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001139- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1140 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001141
1142
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001143What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1144=================================
1145
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001146*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001147
1148Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001149-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001150
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001151- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1152 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1153 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1154
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001155- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1156 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1157 (SF patch #664376.)
1158
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001159- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1160 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1161 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1162 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1163 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1164 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001165 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001166
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001167- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1168 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1169 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1170 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001171 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001172
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001173- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1174 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1175 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1176 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1177 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1178 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1179 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1180 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1181 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1182 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1183 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1184
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001185- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1186 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1187 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1188 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1189 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1190 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1191
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001192- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1193 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1194
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001195- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1196 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1197 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1198 case.)
1199
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001200- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1201 passed as unicode strings.
1202
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001203- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1204 See SF bug #683467.
1205
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001206- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1207 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1208
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001209- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1210
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001211- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1212
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001213- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1214 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1215 arguments.
1216
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001217- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1218 See SF bug #667147.
1219
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001220- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001221 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001222 See SF bug #676155.
1223
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001224- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001225 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001226 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1227 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1228 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1229 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1230 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1231 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001232
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001233Extension modules
1234-----------------
1235
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001236- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1237 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1238 tp_as_number pointer.
1239
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001240- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1241 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1242 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1243 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1244 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1245
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001246- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1247
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001248- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1249
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001250- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001251 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001252 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1253 patch #678531.)
1254
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001255- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1256 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1257
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001258- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1259 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1260
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001261- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1262
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001263- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1264 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1265 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1266
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001267- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1268
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001269- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1270 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1271
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001272- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001273
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001274- datetime changes:
1275
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001276 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1277
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001278 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1279 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1280 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1281 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1282 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1283 now.
1284
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001285 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001286 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1287 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001288
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001289 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001290 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001291 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1292 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1293 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1294 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001295
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001296 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1297 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1298 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001299 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1300
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001301 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1302 by a later example coded by Guido.
1303
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001304 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001305 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1306 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1307 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001308 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1309 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1310
1311 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1312 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1313 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1314 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1315 tzinfo subclass instance.
1316
1317 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1318 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1319 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1320 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1321 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1322 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1323 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1324 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001325
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001326 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1327 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1328 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1329 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1330 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001331 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1332
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001333 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001334
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001335 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1336 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1337 as a naive datetime object.
1338
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001339 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1340 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1341 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1342
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001343 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1344 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1345 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1346 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1347 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1348 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1349 comparison.
1350
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001351 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1352 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1353 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1354 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001355 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001356
1357 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001358
1359 and ::
1360
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001361 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1362
1363 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1364 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1365 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1366 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1367
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001368 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1369 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1370 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1371 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1372 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1373
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001374 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1375 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001376 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1377 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001378
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001379Library
1380-------
1381
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001382- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1383 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1384
1385- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1386 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1387 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1388 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1389 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1390 See PEP 307 for details.
1391
1392- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1393 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1394
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001395- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1396 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001397 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001398 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1399 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001400 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001401
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001402- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1403 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1404
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001405- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1406 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1407 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1408
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001409- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1410
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001411- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1412 exception.
1413
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001414- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1415 class.
1416
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001417- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1418 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1419 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1420
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001421- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1422 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1423
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001424- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001425 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1426 See SF bug #659228.
1427
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001428- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1429 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1430 See SF patch #651082.
1431
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001432- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001433
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001434- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1435 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1436
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001437- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001438 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001439
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001440- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1441 DOS paths from other platforms.
1442
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001443Tools/Demos
1444-----------
1445
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001446- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1447 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1448 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1449 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1450 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1451 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1452 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1453 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1454 example:
1455
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001456 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1457 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001458
1459 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1460
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001461
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001462Build
1463-----
1464
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001465- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1466 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1467 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001468 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1469
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001470 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1471
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001472- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1473 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1474 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1475 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1476 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1477 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1478 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1479 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1480 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1481
1482- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1483 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1484 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1485 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1486
1487- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1488 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1489
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001490C API
1491-----
1492
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001493- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1494 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001495
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001496- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1497 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1498 tp_as_number pointer.
1499
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001500- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1501 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1502 (SF #681367)
1503
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001504- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1505 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1506 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1507 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001508
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001509Tests
1510-----
1511
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001512- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001513 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1514 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1515 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1516 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1517 pydoc.)
1518
1519- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1520
1521- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001522
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001523Windows
1524-------
1525
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001526- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1527 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1528 time).
1529
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001530- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1531 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1532
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001533- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1534 release without strong cryptography.
1535
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001536- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001537 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001538
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001539- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1540 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1541
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001542Mac
1543---
1544
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001545- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1546 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001547
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001548- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1549 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1550 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001551
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001552- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1553 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001554
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001555- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1556 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1557 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1558 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001559
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001560- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001561 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1562 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1563 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001564
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001566What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001567=================================
1568
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001569*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001570
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001571Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001572--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001573
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001574- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1575
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001576- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1577 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001578 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001579 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001580 a different meaning than before.
1581
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001582- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001583 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001584 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001585
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001586- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001587 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001588 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001589
1590- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1591 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1592 and deallocation.
1593
1594- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1595 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1596
1597- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1598 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1599 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1600 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1601 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1602
1603- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1604 now detected by the garbage collector.
1605
1606- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1607 [SF bug 519621]
1608
1609- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1610 identifier.
1611
1612- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1613 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1614 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1615 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1616 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1617 [SF bug 563060]
1618
1619- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1620 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1621 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1622 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1623 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1624
1625- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1626 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1627 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1628
1629- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1630
1631- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1632 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1633 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1634 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1635 state of the slots would be lost.)
1636
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001637Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001638-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001639
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001640- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001641 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1642 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1643 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1644 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001645 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1646 Jython 2.1.
1647
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001648- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001649 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001650 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1651 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1652 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1653 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1654 these, see PEP 302.
1655
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001656- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1657 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1658 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1659
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001660- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1661 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1662 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1663
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001664- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1665 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1666 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1667
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001668- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1669 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1670 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1671 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1672 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1673 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1674 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1675 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1676 releases or implementations.
1677
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001678- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001679 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1680 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001681
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001682- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1683 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1684
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001685- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1686 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1687 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1688
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001689- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1690 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1691
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001692- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1693 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001694 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1695 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001696
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001697- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1698 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1699 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1700 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1701 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1702
1703 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1704 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1705 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1706 pattern.
1707
1708 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1709 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1710 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1711 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1712
1713 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1714 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1715 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1716 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1717 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1718 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1719
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001720- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1721 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1722 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1723 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1724 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1725 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1726 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1727 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001728
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001729- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1730 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1731 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1732 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1733 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001734 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1735 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1736 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1737 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1738 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1739 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1740 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001741
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001742- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1743 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1744
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001745- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1746 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1747 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1748 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1749 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1750 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1751 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1752 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1753 to Zack Weinberg!
1754
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001755- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1756 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1757 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1758 type. This has been fixed now.
1759
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001760- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1761 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1762 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1763
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001764- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1765 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1766 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1767 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1768 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1769 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1770 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1771 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001772 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001773
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001774- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1775 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1776 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001777
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001778- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1779 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1780 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1781 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1782 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1783 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1784 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1785 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001786 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001787 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1788 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1789
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001790- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1791 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1792 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1793 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1794 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1795 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1796 this.)
1797
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001798- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1799 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001800 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001801 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001802 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1803 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001804 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1805 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001806
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001807- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1808 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1809 currently running.
1810
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001811- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1812 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1813 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1814 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1815
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001816- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1817 as directory names.
1818
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001819- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1820 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1821
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001822- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1823 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1824
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001825- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001826 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1827 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001828
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001829- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1830 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1831 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1832 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1833 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1834
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001835- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1836 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1837 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1838 removed.
1839
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001840- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1841 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1842 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1843
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001844- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1845 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1846 to __debug__.
1847
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001848- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1849 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1850 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1851
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001852- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1853 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1854 deprecated now.
1855
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001856- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1857 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1858 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001859
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001860- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1861 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1862 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1863 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1864 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001865
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001866- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1867 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1868
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001869- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1870 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1871 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001872 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001873 is backward compatible.
1874
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001875- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1876 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1877 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1878 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1879 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1880
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001881- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1882 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1883 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1884 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1885 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1886 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001887
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001888- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1889 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1890
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001891- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1892 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1893
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001894- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1895 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1896 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1897 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1898 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1899
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001900- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1901 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1902 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1903
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001904- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001905 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1906
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001907- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1908 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1909 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001910
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001911- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1912 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1913
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001914- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1915 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1916 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1917
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001918- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1919
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001920Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001921-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001922
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001923- Added three operators to the operator module:
1924 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1925 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1926 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1927
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001928- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1929
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001930- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1931 archives.
1932
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001933- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1934 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1935 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1936
1937 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1938
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001939- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1940 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1941 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001942 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001943
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001944- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1945 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1946 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1947 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001948 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1949 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1950 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1951 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001952
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001953- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1954 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001955
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001956- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1957
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001958- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1959 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1960
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001961- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1962 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1963 supported.
1964
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001965- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1966
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001967- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1968 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001969
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001970- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1971 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1972
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001973- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1974
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001975- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1976 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1977
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001978- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1979 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1980 functions but callable type objects.
1981
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001982- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001983 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001984 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001985
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001986- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1987 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001988
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001989- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1990 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001991
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001992- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1993 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1994 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1995 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1996
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001997- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1998 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001999
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002000- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2001 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2002 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2003 and __imul__.
2004
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002005- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002006 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2007 is called.
2008
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002009- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2010 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2011 interpreter was compiled.
2012
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002013- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2014 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2015 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002016 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002017 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2018 1, not 2.
2019
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002020- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2021 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2022 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2023 limit.
2024
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002025- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2026 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2027 bug #623464.
2028
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002029- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2030 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2031 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2032 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2033
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002034Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002035-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002036
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002037- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2038
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002039- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2040 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2041 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2042 with Python 2.3a2.
2043
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002044- os.path exposes getctime.
2045
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002046- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002047 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002048 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002049 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002050 unit tests of floating point results.
2051
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002052- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2053 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2054 has been increased.
2055
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002056- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2057 executed.
2058
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002059- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2060 postinstallation script.
2061
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002062- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2063 test the current module.
2064
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002065- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002066 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2067 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2068 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2069 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2070
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002071- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002072 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002073 Ward's Optik package.
2074
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002075- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2076 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2077 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2078 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2079
2080- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2081 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002082 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002083
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002084- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2085 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2086 shelf are binary pickles.
2087
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002088- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2089 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2090
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002091- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2092 modules are iterators now.
2093
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002094- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2095 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2096 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2097 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2098 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2099 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002100
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002101- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2102 with their entity value.
2103
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002104- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2105
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002106- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2107 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002108
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002109- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2110 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002111 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002112
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002113- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2114 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2115 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2116 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2117 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2118 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2119 main():
2120
2121 import locale
2122 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2123
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002124- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2125 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2126
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002127- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2128 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2129 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2130 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2131 to the new standard.
2132
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002133- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2134 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2135 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2136 an extension to the database.
2137
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002138- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2139 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2140 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2141 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002142 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002143
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002144- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002145 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002146
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002147- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2148 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2149 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2150 bounded integers.
2151
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002152- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2153 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2154 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2155 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2156 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2157 in existence.
2158
2159 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2160 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2161 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2162 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2163 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2164 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2165
2166 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2167 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2168 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2169 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2170
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002171- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2172 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2173 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2174
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002175- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2176
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002177- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2178 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2179 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2180 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2181
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002182- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2183 argument.
2184
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002185- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2186 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2187 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2188 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2189 [SF patch 560794].
2190
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002191- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2192 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2193 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002194 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2195 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2196 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002197
2198- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2199 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002200
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002201- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2202 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2203 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2204 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002205
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002206- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2207 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2208 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2209 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2210 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2211
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002212- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002213
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002214- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2215
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002216- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2217 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2218 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2219 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2220 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2221 identical to None.
2222
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002223- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2224 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2225 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2226 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2227 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2228 results now.
2229
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002230- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2231 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2232
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002233- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2234 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2235 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2236 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2237 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2238 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2239 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2240 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2241
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002242- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2243
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002244- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2245 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2246
2247- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2248 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2249 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2250 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2251 and other systems.
2252
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002253- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2254 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2255 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2256 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 +00002257 work well with these.
2258
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002259- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2260
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002261- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002262 connections.
2263
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002264- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2265 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2266 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2267
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002268- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2269 sets
2270
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002271- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2272 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2273 name.
2274
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002275- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2276 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2277 passed in.
2278
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002279- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002280 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002281 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2282 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002283
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002284- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2285
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002286- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2287
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002288- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2289 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2290 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2291
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002292- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2293 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2294 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2295 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002296 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002297
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002298- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002299 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002300 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002301
2302- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2303 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2304 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2305
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002306- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002307 the value of its expression argument.
2308
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002309- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2310 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2311 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2312
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002313- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2314 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2315 skipstone browser was included.
2316
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002317- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2318 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2319
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002320Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002321-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002322
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002323- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2324 names in addition to accepting file names.
2325
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002326- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2327 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2328 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2329 still used and useful.)
2330
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002331- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2332 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2333 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2334 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002335
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002336- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2337 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2338 the generated binary.
2339
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002340Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002341-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002342
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002343- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2344
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002345- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2346 except in the hands of experts.
2347
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002348- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002349 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2350 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2351 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002352
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002353- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2354 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2355 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2356 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2357 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2358 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2359 builds.
2360
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002361- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2362 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2363 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2364 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2365 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2366 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2367 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2368 new type.
2369
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002370- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002371
2372 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2373 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2374 positive infinities.
2375
2376 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2377 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2378 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2379 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2380 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2381 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2382 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2383
2384 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2385
2386 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2387
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002388- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2389 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2390 size of the executable.
2391
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002392- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2393 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2394 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2395 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002396
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002397- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2398
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002399- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2400 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2401 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002402
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002403- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2404 well as Unix.
2405
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002406- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2407 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2408 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2409 modules in the README file for details.
2410
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002411C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002412-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002413
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002414- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2415 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002416 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002417 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002418 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002419
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002420- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2421 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2422 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2423 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2424 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2425 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002426 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002427 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2428 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2429 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2430 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2431 aligned.)
2432
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002433- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2434 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2435 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2436
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002437- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2438 level.
2439
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002440- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2441 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2442 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2443 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2444 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2445
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002446- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2447 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2448 code.
2449
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002450- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2451 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2452 adjusting for negative indices.
2453
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002454- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2455 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2456 object.
2457
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002458- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2459 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2460 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2461
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002462- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2463 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002464
2465- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2466
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002467- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2468 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2469 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2470 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2471
2472- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2473
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002474- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002475
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002476- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002477 without going through the buffer API.
2478
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002479- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002480
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002481- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2482 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2483 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2484 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2485
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002486- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2487 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2488
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002489- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002490 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2491
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002492New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002493-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002494
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002495- OpenVMS is now supported.
2496
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002497- AtheOS is now supported.
2498
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002499- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2500
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002501- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2502
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002503Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002504-----
2505
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002506- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2507 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2508 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002509
2510Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002511-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002512
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002513- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2514 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2515 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2516 bugs.
2517 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002518 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002519 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2520 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002521 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002522
2523- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002524 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002525
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002526- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2527 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2528
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002529- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2530 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002531 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002532 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2533
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002534- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2535 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2536 use files" uninstall option).
2537
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002538- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2539
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002540- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2541 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2542
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002543- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2544 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2545 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2546
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002547- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2548 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2549 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2550 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2551 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002552 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2553 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2554 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002555
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002556- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002557 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002558 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2559 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2560 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2561 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2562 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2563 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2564 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2565 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2566 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2567 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2568 work around.
2569
2570- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2571 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2572 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2573 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2574 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2575 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2576 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2577 specified with O_CREAT too).
2578
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002579Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002580----
2581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002582- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002583
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002584- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2585 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2586 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2587
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002588- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2589 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2590 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2591
2592- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2593 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2594 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2595 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2596 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2597 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2598 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2599 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002600
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002601- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2602 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2603 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002605- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2606 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2607 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2608 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2609 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002610
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002611- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2612 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2613 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002614
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002615- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2616 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002617
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002618- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2619 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2620 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2621 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2622 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002623
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002624- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2625 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2626 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2627
2628- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2629 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2630 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002631
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002632- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2633 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2634 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2635 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002636 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002637
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002638- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2639 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002640
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002641- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2642 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002643
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002644- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002645 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002646 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2647 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002648
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002649
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002650What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002651===============================
2652
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002655Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002656--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002657
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002658- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2659 with a custom metaclass.
2660
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002661Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002662-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002663
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002664- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2665 are proxies.
2666
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002667Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002668-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002669
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002670- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2671 very short strings.
2672
2673- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2674 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2675 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2676 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2677 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002679Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002681
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002682- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2683 close or delete time).
2684
2685- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2686 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2687
2688- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2689
2690- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002691 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002692
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002693Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002694-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002695
2696Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002698
2699C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002700-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002701
2702New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002703-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002704
2705Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002706-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002707
2708Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002709-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002710
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002711- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2712
2713- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2714 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2715
2716- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2717 deleted at process exit time.
2718
2719- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2720 in backslash.
2721
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002722Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002724
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002725- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2726 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2727 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2728
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002729
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002730What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002731===========================
2732
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002733*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2734
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002735Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002737
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002738- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2739 been extensively updated. See
2740
2741 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2742
2743 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2744
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002745- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2746 deleted!
2747
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002748- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2749 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2750 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2751 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2752 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2753
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002754- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2755
2756 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2757 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2758
2759 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2760 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2761 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2762 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2763 supported anyway.
2764
2765 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2766 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2767
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002768- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2769 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2770 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2771 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2772 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002773
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002774- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2775 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2776 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2777
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002778Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002780
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002781- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2782 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2783 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2784 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2785 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2786 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002787 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2788 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2789 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2790 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002791
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002792- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2793 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2794 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2795
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002796Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002798
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002799- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2800
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002801Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002802-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002803
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002804- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2805 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2806 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2807 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2808 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2809 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2810
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002811- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2812
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002813- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2814
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002815- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2816
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002817- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2818 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2819 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2820
2821- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2822
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002823Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002825
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002826- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2827 off a search on Google.
2828
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002829Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002830-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002831
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002832- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2833 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2834 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2835 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2836 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2837 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2838 other platforms should do likewise.
2839
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002840- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2841 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2842 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2843
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002844C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002846
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002847- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2848 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2849 producing key-value pairs.
2850
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002851- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002852 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002853 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2854 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2855 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2856 previously went unchallenged.
2857
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002858New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002859-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002860
2861Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002863
2864Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002865-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002866
2867Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002869
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002870- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2871 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002872
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002873- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2874 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2875 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2876 home.
2877
2878
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002879What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002880===========================
2881
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002882*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2883
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002884Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002885--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002886
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002887- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2888 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002889
2890 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002891 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002892
2893 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2894 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002895 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002896 This needs to be documented.
2897
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002898- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2899 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2900
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002901- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2902 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2903 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2904
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002905- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2906 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2907
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002908- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2909 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2910 class forbids it).
2911
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002912- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2913 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2914 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2915
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002916- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2917
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002918Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002919-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002920
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002921- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2922 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002923 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002924
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002925- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2926 (like 1 + '').
2927
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002928Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002930
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002931- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2932 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2933 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2934 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002935 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002936 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2937
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002938- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2939 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2940 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2941 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2942
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002943- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2944 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002945 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2946 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2947 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002948
2949- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2950 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002951
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002952- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2953 bytes on its input.
2954
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002955Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002956-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002957
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002958- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002959 convenience function.
2960
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002961- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2962 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2963 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002964 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2965 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2966 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2967 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2968 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2969 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002970
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002971- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2972 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2973 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2974 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2975
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002976- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2977 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2978 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2979
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002980- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2981 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2982 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2983 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2984
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002985- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2986 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002988 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2989 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2990 new -l and -e options.
2991
2992- statcache is now deprecated.
2993
2994- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2995 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002997 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2998 time properly taken into account.
2999
3000- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3001 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3002 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3003 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3004
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003005Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003007
3008Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003010
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003011- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3012 is built with libdb3 if available.
3013
3014- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3015
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003016C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003018
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003019- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3020 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3021 PySequence_Size().
3022
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003023- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3024
3025- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3026 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3027 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3028
3029- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3030 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3031
3032- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3033 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3034
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003035New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003037
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003038- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3039 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3040
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003041- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3042 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3043
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003044- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003046Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003048
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003049- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3050 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3051
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003052Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003053-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003054
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003055Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003056----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003057
3058- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3059 removed completely in the next release.
3060
3061- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3062 OSX.
3063
3064- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3065 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3066
3067- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003069
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003070What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003071===========================
3072
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003073*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3074
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003075Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003077
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003078- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003079 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003080 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003081 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3082 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003083 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3084 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003085 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3086 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003087
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003088- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3089 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3090
3091- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3092 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3093
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003094Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003095-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003096
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003097- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3098 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3099 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3100 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3101 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3102 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3103 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3104 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3105
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003106- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3107 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3108 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3109 example).
3110
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003111- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003112 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003113 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003114 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003115
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003116- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3117 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3118 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003119 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003120
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003121- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3122 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3123 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3124 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3125 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3126 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3127
3128 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3129
3130 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3131
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003132Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003134
3135- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3136
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003137- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3138
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003139- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3140 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003141
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003142- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3143 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3144 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3145 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3146 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3147 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003148 attributes.
3149
3150- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3151 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3152 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003153
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003154- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3155 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3156 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003157
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003158- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3159 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3160 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003161 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3162 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3163
3164- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3165 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003166
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003167Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003169
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003170- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3171 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3172
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003173- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3174 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3175 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3176 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3177
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003178- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3179 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3180 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3181 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3182
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003183 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3184 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3185 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3186 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3187 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3188 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3189 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3190 without losing information).
3191
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003192- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003193 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3194 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3195 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3196 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3197 module).
3198
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003199 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003200 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3201 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3202 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3203 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003204
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003205- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003206 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3207 encoding.
3208
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003209- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3210 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3211
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003213 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3214
3215- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3216 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3217 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3218 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3219
3220- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3221
3222- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3223 ON, and OFF.
3224
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003225- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3226 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3227
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003228Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003230
3231- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3232 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3233 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003234
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003235- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3236 been added: -X and -E.
3237
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003238Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003240
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003241- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3242 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3243
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003244C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003245-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003246
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003247- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3248 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3249 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3250 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3251 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3252
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003253- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3254 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3255 as long) arguments.
3256
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003257- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3258 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3259 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3260 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3261 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3262 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3263
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003264- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3265 input.
3266
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003267New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003269
3270Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003272
3273Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003275
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003276- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3277 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3278 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3279
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003280- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3281 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3282 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003283 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003284
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3286 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3287 import signal
3288 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003289
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003291 while 1:
3292 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003294 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3295 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3296 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3297 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003298
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003299
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003300What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3301===========================
3302
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3304
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003305Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003307
3308- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3309 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3310 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3311
3312- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3313 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3314 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3315 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3316 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3317 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3318 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003319
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003320- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003321 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003322 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3323 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3324 associate a docstring with a property.
3325
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003326- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3327 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3328 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3329 other built-in object types.
3330
3331- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3332 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3333 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3334 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3335 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3336
3337- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3338 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3339
3340- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3341 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003342 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003343 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3344 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3345 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3346 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3347 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3348
3349- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3350 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3351 class.
3352
3353- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3354 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3355 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3356 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3357
3358- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3359 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3360 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3361 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3362
3363- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3364 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3365
3366- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3367 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3368 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3369 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3370 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003371 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003372 with the same value as s.
3373
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003374- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3375
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003376Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003378
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003379- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3380
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003381- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3382 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3383 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3384 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3385 objects.
3386
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003387- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3388 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003389 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3390 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3391
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003392- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3393 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3394 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3395
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003396Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003398
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003399- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3400 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3401 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3402 by the instances.
3403
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003404- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3405 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3406 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3407
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003408- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3409 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3410 before the entire comparison is complete.
3411
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003412- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3413 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3414 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3415
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003416- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3417 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3418 getwriter().
3419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003420- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3421 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3422
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003423- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003424 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3425 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3426
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003427- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3428 iterable object.
3429
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003430- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3431 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003432
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003433- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3434 authentication.
3435
3436- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3437 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003438
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003439- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003440 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3441 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3442 a sample driver.)
3443
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003444Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003446
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003447- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3448 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3449 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3450 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3451 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3452 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3453 kernel has large file support.
3454
3455- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3456 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3457 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3458 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3459 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3460
3461- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3462 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3463 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3464
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003465C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003466-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003467
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003468- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3469 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3470
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003471New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003473
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003474- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3475 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3476
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003477Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003479
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003480- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3481 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3482 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3483 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3484 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3485
3486- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3487 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3488 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3489 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3490
3491- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3492 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3493
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003494Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003496
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003497- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003498 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3499 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003500
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003501
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003502What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3503===========================
3504
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3506
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003507Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003508----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003509
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003510- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3511 big to represent as a C double.
3512
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003513- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3514 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3515 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3516 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3517 restriction).
3518
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003519- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3520 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3521 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3522 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3523 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3524
3525 >>> dir([])
3526 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3527 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3528 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3529 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3530 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3531 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3532 'reverse', 'sort']
3533
3534 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3535
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003536- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003537 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3538 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3539 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3540 OverflowError exception.
3541
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003542- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003543 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003544 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3545 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3546 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3547 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3548 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003549 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3551 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3552
3553 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3554 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3555 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3556 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003558- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003559 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3560 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3561 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3562 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3563 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3564 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3565 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3566 once it is created.
3567
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003568- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3569 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3570 (key, value) pairs.
3571
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003572- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003573 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3574 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3575
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003576- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3577 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3578 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3579 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3580 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003581
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003582- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003583 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3584 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3585
3586 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3587
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003588- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003589 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3590
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003591Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003593
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003594- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003595 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3596 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003597
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003598- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3599 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3600 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3601 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3602 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3603 in this area anymore).
3604
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003605- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3606 threading.Timer.
3607
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003608- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3609 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3610
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003611- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003612 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3613
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003614- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003615 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3616 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3617 converted to Python longs.
3618
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003619- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003620 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3621
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003622- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3623 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3624 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3625
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003626Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003628
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003629- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3630 division operators as per PEP 238.
3631
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003632Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003634
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003635- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3636 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3637 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3638 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3639
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003640C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003642
3643- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003644
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003645- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3646 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003647 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003648
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3650 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003651 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003653
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003654- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003655 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3656 module:
3657
3658 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003659
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003660 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3661 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003662
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003663 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3664 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003665
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003666 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3667
3668 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3669
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003670- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003671 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3672 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3673 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003674
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003675New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003677
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003678- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3679 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3680 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3681 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3682 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003683
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003686
3687Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003689
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003690- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3691 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3692 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3693 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003694 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3695 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3696 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3697 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3698 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003699
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003700- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003701 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3702
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003703
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003704What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3705===========================
3706
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3708
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003709Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003711
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003712- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3713 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3714
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003715- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3716 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3717 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003718
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003719- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3720 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3721 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3722 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003723
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003724- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3725
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003727
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003728Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003730
3731- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003732 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003733 the module docstring for details.
3734
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003735Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003737
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003738- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003739 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3740 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3741 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003742
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003743- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3744 Nick Mathewson.
3745
3746Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003748
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003749- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3750 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3751 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3752 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3753 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3754 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3755 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3756 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3757
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003758- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3759 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3760 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3761 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3762
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003763- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3764 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3765 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3766 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3767 come a long way).
3768
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003769- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3770 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3771 write filters for these warnings).
3772
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003773- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3774 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3775 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3776 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3777 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3778
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003779- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3780 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3781 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3782 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3783 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3784 older distribution.
3785
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003786Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003788
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003789- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3790 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003791 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003792
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003793- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3794 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3795 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3796
3797- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3798
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003799- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3800
3801- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3802
3803- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3804
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003806
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003807- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3808
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003809New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003811
3812C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003814
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003815- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3816 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3817 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3818 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3819 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3820 against buffer overruns.
3821
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003822- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003823 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3824 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003825 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3826 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3827 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3828
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003829- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3830 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3831 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3832 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3833 deprecated.
3834
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003835Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003837
3838- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3839 relevant is found.
3840
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003841
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003842What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003843===========================
3844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3846
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003847Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003848----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003849
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003850- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3851 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3852 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3853 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3854 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3855 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3856 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3857 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003858 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003859 repaired.
3860
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003861- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003862 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003863 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3864 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3865 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3866 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3867 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3868 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3869 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3870 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3871
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003872- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3873 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3874 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3875 leading BMO character).
3876
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003877- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3878 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3879 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3880
3881 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3882 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3883 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003884
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003885 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3886 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3887 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3888 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3889 for various simple to use conversions.
3890
3891 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3892 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3893
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3895 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3896 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3897 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3898 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3899 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3900 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3901 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3902 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3903 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3904 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3905 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3906 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3907 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3908 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003909
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003910- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3911 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3912 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003913 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003914 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003915
3916 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003917 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3918 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3919 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3920 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3921 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003922 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3923 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003924
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003925 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3926 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3927 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003928 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003929
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003930- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3931 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3932 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3933 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3934 floating arithmetic,
3935
3936 x = 9007199254740992.0
3937 print long(x)
3938
3939 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3940 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3941 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3942 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3943 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3944 functions are of good quality).
3945
3946 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3947 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3948 algorithms to break.
3949
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003950- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3951 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3952 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3953 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3954 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3955 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3956 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3957 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3958 order.
3959
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003960- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3961 operation along the most common code paths.
3962
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003963- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3964 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3965
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003966- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3967 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3968 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3969 {}.update(UserDict())
3970
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003971- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3972 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3973 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3974 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3975 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3976 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3977 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3978 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3979
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003980- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003981 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003983 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003984 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3985 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003986 join() method of strings
3987 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003988 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3989 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003991 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003992
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003993- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3994 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3995
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003996- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3997 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3998
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003999- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4000 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4001 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4002 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4003
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004004- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4005 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004006 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004007 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4008 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004009
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004010- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4011
4012
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004013Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004015
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004016- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004017 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004018 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4019 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4020
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004021- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4022 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4023
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004024- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4025 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4026 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4027 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4028
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004029- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4030 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4031 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4032
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004033- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4034
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004035- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4036
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004037- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4038 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4039 that are still imported into string.py).
4040
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004041- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4042
4043- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4044 Now it does.
4045
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004046- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4047
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004048- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4049 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4050 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4051 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4052 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004053 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4054 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004055
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004056- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4057 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4058 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4059 'help(object)'.
4060
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004061Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004063
4064- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004065 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004066 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4067 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4068
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004069- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004070 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4071 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004072
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004075
4076- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4077 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078
4079----
4080
4081**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**