blob: 77e85699f0fab28b22de9448714973483ca9c89b [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000015- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
16
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000017- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
18 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
19
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000020- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
21
22- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
23
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000024- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
25 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
26 was empty.
27
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000028- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
29 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
30
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000031- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000032 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000033
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000034- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
35 codes.
36
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000037- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
38 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
39 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
40
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000041- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
42 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
43
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000044- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000045 (fixes bug #1119418).
46
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000047- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
48
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000049- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
50 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
51
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000052- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
53 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
54 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
55
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000056- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
57
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000058- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
59 reference counts in some error exit cases.
60
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000061- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
62 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
63 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
64 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
65 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
66 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
67 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
68 realloc.
69
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000070- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
71 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
72
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000073- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
74 like their int counterparts.
75
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000076- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
77 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
78 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
79 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
80 for a longer write-up of the problem).
81
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000082- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
83 serializing floats.
84
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000085- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
86 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
87 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
88
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000089- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
90 278.
91
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000092- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
93 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
94 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
95 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000096 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000097 PyNumber_*().
98 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
99
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000100- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
101 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
102 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
103 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
104
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000105- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
106 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
107 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
108 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
109 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
110
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000111- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
112 disabled caused a crash.
113
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000114- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
115 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000118 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
119
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000120- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
121
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000122- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000123 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
124 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
125 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000126
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000127- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
128
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000129- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
130 returning None.
131
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000132- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000133 ('\') with a specific error message.
134
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000135- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
136
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000137- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
138 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
139
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000140- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000141 an ferror() call.
142
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000143- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
144 list.sort().
145
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000146- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
147 (2+3) --> (5).
148
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000149- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
150
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000151- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
152 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000153
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000154- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
155 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
156 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
157
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000158- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
159 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
160 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
161
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000162Extension Modules
163-----------------
164
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000165- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
166 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
167
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000168- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
169
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000170- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
171 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
172
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000173- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
174 returns in cStringIO.c.
175
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000176- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
177 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
178
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000179- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
180
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000181- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
182
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000183- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
184 the file system encoding.
185
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000186- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
187 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000188
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000189- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
190
191- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000192 line without newlines.
193
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000194- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
195 on Windows.
196
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000197- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000198 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
199
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000200- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
201 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
202 for large or negative values.
203
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000204- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000205 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000206
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000207- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
208
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000209- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
210 if available on the platform.
211
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000212- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
213 available on the platform.
214
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000215- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
216 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
217
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000218- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
219
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000220- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
221 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
222 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
223
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000224- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
225
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000226- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
227 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
228
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000229- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000230 file size.
231
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000232- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
233
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000234- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
235 {remove_history,replace_history}
236
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000237- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
238 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000239
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000240- stat_float_times is now True.
241
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000242- array.array objects are now picklable.
243
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000244- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
245 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
246
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000247- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
248 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
249 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
250
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000251- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
252 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000253
254Library
255-------
256
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000257- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
258
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000259- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000260 "parent" argument.
261
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000262- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
263 for padding.
264
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000265- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
266 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
267
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000268- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
269 to get the correct encoding.
270
271- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
272 languages.
273
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000274- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
275
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000276- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
277
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000278- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
279
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000280- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
281 functionality.
282
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000283- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
284
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000285- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
286 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
287
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000288- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
289 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
290 match the Content-Length header.
291
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000292- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
293
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000294- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
295 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000296 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000297
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000298- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
299
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000300- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
301
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000302- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
303 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
304
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000305- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
306 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
307 Tkdnd.
308
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000309- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
310 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
311
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000312- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
313 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
314
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000315- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000316 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
317
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000318- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
319 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
320
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000321- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
322 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
323
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000324- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000325 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000326
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000327- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
328
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000329- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
330 error messages.
331
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000332- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
333
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000334- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
335 Bug #1224621.
336
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000337- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
338 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
339 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
340 terminates by raising StopIteration.
341
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000342- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
343
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000344- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
345 component of the path.
346
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000347- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
348 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
349 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
350 class at all.
351
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000352- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
353 files to PyPI.
354
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000355- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
356 them to PyPI.
357
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000358- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
359 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
360 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
361 work as expected.
362
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000363- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
364 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
365
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000366- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000367 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
368
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000369- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
370
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000371- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
372 to build.
373
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000374- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
375 symbolic links on Windows.
376
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000377- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000378 profile.py if available.
379
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000380- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
381
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000382- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
383 in LWPCookieJar.
384
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000385- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
386
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000387- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
388
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000389- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
390
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000391- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
392
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000393- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
394
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000395- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
396
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000397- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
398
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000399- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
400
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000401- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
402 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
403 be exploited in various ways.
404
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000405- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
406
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000407- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
408
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000409- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
410
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000411- Enhancements to the csv module:
412
413 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000414 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000415 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000416 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
417 reporting.
418 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
419 dictates.
420 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000421 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000422 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000423 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
424 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000425 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
426 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000427 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000428 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
429 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
430 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
431 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
432 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
433 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
434 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
435 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
436 without first creating a dialect class.
437 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
438 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
439 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000440 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000441 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
442 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000443 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
444 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
445 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
446 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000447 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
448 This has been fixed.
449
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000450- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
451 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
452 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
453 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
454
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000455- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
456
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000457- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
458 (Bug #951915).
459
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000460- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
461 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
462 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000463 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000464
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000465- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
466
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000467- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
468 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
469
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000470- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
471
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000472- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
473
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000474- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
475
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000476- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
477
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000478- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
479
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000480- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
481 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
482 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
483
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000484- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000485 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000486
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000487- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
488 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
489 tokenizer with very long source lines.
490
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000491- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
492 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
493
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000494- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
495 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000496
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000497- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
498 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
499
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000500- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
501 correctly.
502
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000503- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
504 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
505 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
506 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
507 between two lines.
508
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000509- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
510 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
511 handlers.
512
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000513- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000514 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
515 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000516
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000517- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
518 considering it exactly like a '*'.
519
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000520- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
521 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000522
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000523Build
524-----
525
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000526- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
527 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
528
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000529- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
530 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
531
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000532- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
533 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
534 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000535 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000536
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000537- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
538 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
539 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
540
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000541- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
542
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000543- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
544 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
545
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000546- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
547 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
548 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
549 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
550 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
551 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
552 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
553 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
554
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000555- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
556 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
557 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
558 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
559
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000560
561C API
562-----
563
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000564- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
565
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000566- Removed PyRange_New().
567
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000568- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
569 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
570 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
571 mappings.
572
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000573
574Tests
575-----
576
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000577- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000578
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000579
580Documentation
581-------------
582
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000583- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
584
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000585- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
586
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000587- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
588
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000589- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
590
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000591- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
592
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000593- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
594
595- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
596
597- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
598
599- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
600
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000601- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
602 Closes bug #1166582.
603
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000604- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
605 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
606 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
607
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000608Mac
609---
610
611
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000612New platforms
613-------------
614
615- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
616
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000617
618Tools/Demos
619-----------
620
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000621- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
622 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
623 source files that need an encoding declaration.
624 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
625
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000626- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
627
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000628- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000629
630
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000631What's New in Python 2.4 final?
632===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000633
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000634*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000635
636Core and builtins
637-----------------
638
639- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
640 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
641 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
642
643
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000644What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
645==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000646
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000647*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000648
649Core and builtins
650-----------------
651
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000652- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
653 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
654 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
655
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000656
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000657Library
658-------
659
660- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
661 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
662 raised is re-raised.
663
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000664- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
665 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
666
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000667- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
668 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
669 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
670 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
671 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
672 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
673 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
674 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
675 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
676 by the slice are recomputed now.
677
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000678- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000679
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000680Build
681-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000682
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000683- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
684 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
685 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000686
687C API
688-----
689
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000690- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
691
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000692
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000693What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
694================================
695
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000696*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000697
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000698License
699-------
700
701The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
702is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
703changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
704Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
705intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
706durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
707the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
708License::
709
710 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
711
712says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
713to Python 2.1.1.
714
715The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
716License Version 2.
717
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000718Core and builtins
719-----------------
720
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000721- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
722 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
723 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
724 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
725 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
726 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
727 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
728 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
729 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
730 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
731
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000732- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000733
734Extension Modules
735-----------------
736
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000737- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
738 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
739 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
740 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000741
742Library
743-------
744
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000745- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
746 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
747 returned.
748
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000749- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
750
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000751- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
752 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
753
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000754- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
755
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000756- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
757 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000758
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000759- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
760
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000761- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
762
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000763- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000764 the source code is updated and reloaded.
765
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000766Build
767-----
768
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000769- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000770
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000771What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
772================================
773
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000774*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000775
776Core and builtins
777-----------------
778
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000779- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000780 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
781
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000782- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
783 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
784 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
785 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
786
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000787- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
788 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
789
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000790- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
791 constant.
792
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000793- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
794 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
795 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
796 large), and to anomalies such as
797 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
798 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
799 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
800 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000801
802Extension modules
803-----------------
804
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000805- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
806 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000807 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
808 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
809 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000810
811Library
812-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000813
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000814- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000815 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000816 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
817 --swig-cpp.
818
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000819- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
820 it is set.
821
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000822- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000823
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000824- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
825 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
826 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
827 Closes bug #1039270.
828
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000829- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000830
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000831 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000832 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
833 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
834 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
835 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
836 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
837 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
838 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
839 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
840 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
841 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
842 + Updates to documentation.
843
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000844- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
845 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
846 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
847 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
848
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000849- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000850
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000851- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
852 applications should use the getmember function.
853
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000854- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
855
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000856- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
857 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
858 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
859 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
860 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
861 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
862 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
863 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
864 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
865
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000866- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
867 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000868 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000869
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000870- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
871 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
872 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
873 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
874 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
875 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
876 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
877 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000878
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000879- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
880 the new public features (of which there are many).
881
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000882- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000883 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
884 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
885 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
886 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000887 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000888
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000889- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
890
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000891- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
892 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
893 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
894 options.
895
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000896- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
897 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
898 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
899 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
900 conditions under which non-string values work.
901
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000902Build
903-----
904
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000905- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
906 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
907 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
908
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000909- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
910 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
911 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
912 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
913 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000914
915C API
916-----
917
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000918- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
919 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
920
921- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
922
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000923- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
924 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
925 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
926 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
927 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
928 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
929 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
930 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
931 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
932
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000933- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
934
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000935- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
936 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
937 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000938
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000939Tests
940-----
941
942- test__locale ported to unittest
943
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000944Mac
945---
946
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000947- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
948 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
949 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000950
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000951Tools/Demos
952-----------
953
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000954- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
955 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
956 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
957 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
958 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000959
960
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000961What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
962=================================
963
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000964*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000965
966Core and builtins
967-----------------
968
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000969- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000970 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
971
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000972- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
973 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
974 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
975 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
976 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
977 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
978 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
979 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000980 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
981 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
982 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
983 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
984 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000985
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000986- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
987 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
988 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
989 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
990 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
991
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000992- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
993
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000994- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
995 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
996
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000997- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
998 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
999 modified the list.
1000
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001001- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1002 functions is now writable.
1003
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001004- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1005 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1006 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1007 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1008
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001009- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1010 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1011 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1012 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1013 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001014
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001015- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1016 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1017
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001018Extension modules
1019-----------------
1020
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001021- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1022
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001023- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1024 data.
1025
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001026- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1027 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1028 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1029 supposed to have been truncated away.
1030
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001031- Added socket.socketpair().
1032
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001033- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1034 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1035
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001036- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001037 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1038
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001039Library
1040-------
1041
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001042- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001043 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001044
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001045- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1046 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1047
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001048- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1049 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1050
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001051- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1052
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001053- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1054 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001055
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001056- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1057 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1058
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001059- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1060
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001061- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1062
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001063- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1064
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001065- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1066 Percivall.
1067
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001068- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1069 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1070
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001071- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1072 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1073 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001074 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001075
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001076- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1077 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1078 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1079 and exponent.
1080
1081- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1082
1083- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001084 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001085 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1086
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001087- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1088 to the readline module.
1089
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001090- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001091 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1092 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001093
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001094- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1095 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1096 contains symlinks.
1097
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001098- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1099 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1100
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001101- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1102 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1103 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1104
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001105- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1106 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1107 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1108 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1109 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1110 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1111 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1112 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1113 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1114 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1115 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1116 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1117 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1118
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001119- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1120
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001121Tools/Demos
1122-----------
1123
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001124- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1125 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1126
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001127- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1128
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001129Build
1130-----
1131
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001132- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1133 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1134 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1135 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1136 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1137 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1138 plans to do so.
1139
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001140- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1141 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1142
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001143- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1144 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1145
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001146- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1147 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1148
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001149- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1150 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1151
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001152- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1153 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1154
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001155C API
1156-----
1157
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001158..
1159
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001160Documentation
1161-------------
1162
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001163- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1164 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1165
1166- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1167 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1168 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001169
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001170New platforms
1171-------------
1172
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001173- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001175Tests
1176-----
1177
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001178..
1179
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001180Windows
1181-------
1182
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001183- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1184 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1185 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1186 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1187 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1188 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1189 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1190 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1191 the problem.
1192
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001193Mac
1194---
1195
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001196..
1197
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001198
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001199What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1200=================================
1201
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001202*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001203
1204Core and builtins
1205-----------------
1206
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001207- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1208 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1209 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1210 sensitive code.
1211
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001212- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001213 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001214
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001215 @staticmethod
1216 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001217
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001218 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001219
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001220- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1221 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1222 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1223 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1224 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1225 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1226 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1227 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1228 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1229 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1230 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1231
1232 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1233 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1234 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1235 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1236 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1237 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1238 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1239
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001240- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1241 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1242
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001243- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001244 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001245
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001246- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001247 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001248 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1249
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001250- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001251 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1252 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1253
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001254- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1255 types that support garbage collection.
1256
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001257- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1258
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001259- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1260 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1261 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1262 Jython.
1263
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001264- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1265
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001266- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1267 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1268
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001269- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1270 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1271 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001272
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001273- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1274 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1275 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1276
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001277Extension modules
1278-----------------
1279
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001280- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1281
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001282Library
1283-------
1284
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001285- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1286 TIS-620
1287
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001288- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1289 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1290 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1291 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1292 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1293 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1294 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1295 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1296 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1297 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1298
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001299- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1300
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001301- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1302 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1303 same as when the argument is omitted).
1304 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1305
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001306- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1307
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001308- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1309 schemes are offered.
1310
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001311- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1312
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001313- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1314 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1315 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1316
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001317- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1318
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001319- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1320 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1321
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001322- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1323 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1324 when dummy_threading is being used.
1325
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001326- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1327 from a tarfile.
1328
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001329- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001330 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001331
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001332- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1333 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1334 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1335 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1336
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001337- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1338 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1339
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001340- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1341 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1342 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1343 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1344 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1345 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1346 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1347 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1348 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1349 by some other method in progress).
1350
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001351- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1352 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1353 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001354
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001355- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1356
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001357- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1358 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1359 AM Kuchling.
1360
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001361- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1362 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1363 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1364
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001365- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1366 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1367 instead of unsigned.
1368
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001369- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001370 no longer part of the public API.
1371
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001372- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1373 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1374 string methods of the same name).
1375
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001376- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001377 SF patch 945642.
1378
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001379- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1380
1381 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1382
1383 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1384 DocTestSuites.
1385
1386- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1387 that provide thread-local data.
1388
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001389- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1390 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1391
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001392- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1393
1394- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1395 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1396 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1397
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001398- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1399
1400 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1401 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1402 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001403
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001404 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1405 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1406 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1407 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1408
1409 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1410 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1411
1412 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1413 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1414 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1415 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1416
1417 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1418 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1419 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1420 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1421 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1422
1423 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1424 wrapping help output.
1425
1426 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1427 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1428 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001429
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001430C API
1431-----
1432
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001433- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1434 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1435 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1436 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1437 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1438 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1439 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1440 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1441 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1442 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1443 its visible semantics have not changed.
1444
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001445- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1446 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1447
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001448Documentation
1449-------------
1450
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001451- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001452
1453 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001454 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001455
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001456 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001457
1458 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1459
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001460- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001461
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001462Tests
1463-----
1464
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001465- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001466 platforms that use the Makefile.
1467
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001468- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1469 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1470 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1471
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001472
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001473What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1474=================================
1475
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001476*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001477
1478Core and builtins
1479-----------------
1480
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001481- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1482 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1483 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1484 objects now (one object instead of three).
1485
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001486- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1487 Windows DLLs.
1488
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001489- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1490 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001491
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001492- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1493 a new .pyc magic.
1494
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001495- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1496 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1497 be there.
1498
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001499- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1500 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1501 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1502
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001503- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1504 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1505 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1506
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001507- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1508
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001509- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1510 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1511 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001512
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001513- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1514 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1515
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001516- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1517
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001518- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001519 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001520
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001521- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1522
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001523- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1524
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001525- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1526 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1527
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001528- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1529 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1530 Fixes bug #858016 .
1531
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001532- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1533 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1534 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1535
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001536- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1537 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1538 improves their performance (about 35%).
1539
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001540- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1541 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1542 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1543
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001544- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1545 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1546 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1547 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1548
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001549- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1550 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001551 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001552 length is not known).
1553
1554- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1555 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001556 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1557 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001558 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1559
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001560- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1561 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1562
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001563- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1564 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1565 keyword arguments.
1566
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001567- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1568 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1569 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1570
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001571- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1572 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1573 cases.
1574
1575- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1576 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1577 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1578 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1579 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1580 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1581 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1582 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1583 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1584 a release build.
1585
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001586- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1587 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1588
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001589- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001590 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001591
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001592- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1593 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1594 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1595 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1596 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1597 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1598 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1599 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1600 destroyed.
1601
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001602- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1603 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1604 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1605 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1606 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1607 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1608 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1609 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1610
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001611- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1612 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1613 character other than a space.
1614
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001615- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1616 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1617 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1618 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1619 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1620 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1621 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1622 attributes with the same name.
1623
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001624- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1625 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1626 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1627 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1628 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1629 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1630 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1631 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1632 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1633 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1634 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1635 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1636 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1637 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001638
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001639- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1640 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1641 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1642 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1643 This has been repaired.
1644
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001645- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1646
1647- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1648
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001649- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1650 over a sequence.
1651
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001652- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001653 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001654
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001655- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1656
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001657- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1658 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1659 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1660 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1661 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1662 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1663 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1664 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1665
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001666- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1667 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1668 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1669
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001670- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1671 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1672 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1673 freelist.
1674
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001675- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1676 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1677
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001678- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1679 number.
1680
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001681- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1682 a TypeError exception.
1683
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001684- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1685 820195.
1686
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001687- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1688 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1689 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1690
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001691- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001692 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1693 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001694
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001695- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1696 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1697 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1698
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001699- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1700 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001701 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001702
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001703- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001704 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1705 the first call.
1706
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001707
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001708Extension modules
1709-----------------
1710
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001711- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1712 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1713
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001714- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1715 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1716 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1717 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1718 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1719 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1720 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001721
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001722- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1723
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001724- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1725
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001726- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1727 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1728
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001729- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1730 fewer false positives.
1731
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001732- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1733 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1734
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001735- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001736 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1737
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001738- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001739 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001740 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001741 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1742 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001743
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001744- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1745 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1746 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1747 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1748
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001749- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1750 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1751 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1752 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1753 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1754 #897625.
1755
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001756- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1757 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1758
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001759- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1760 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1761 and pops on either side of the deque.
1762
1763- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1764 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1765
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001766- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1767 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1768 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1769 other functions that expect a function argument.
1770
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001771- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1772
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001773- os.getsid was added.
1774
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001775- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1776 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1777 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1778
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001779- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1780
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001781- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1782
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001783- readline.clear_history was added.
1784
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001785- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1786
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001787- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1788
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001789- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1790
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001791- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1792
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001793- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1794
1795- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1796
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001797- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1798
1799- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1800
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001801- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1802 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1803 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1804
1805- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1806 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1807 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1808 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1809 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1810 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1811 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1812
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001813- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1814 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1815 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1816 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001817
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001818- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001819 iterators from a single iterable.
1820
1821- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1822 of raising a TypeError exception.
1823
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001824- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1825 as parameter.
1826
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001827Library
1828-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001829
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001830- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1831
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001832- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1833 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1834 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001835
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001836- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1837 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1838 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001839
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001840- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001841
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001842- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1843 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001844
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001845- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1846 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1847
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001848- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1849
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001850- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001851 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001852
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001853- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001854 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001855
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001856- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1857
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001858- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1859 on cygwin and mingw32.
1860
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001861- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1862
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001863- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1864 module.
1865
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001866- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1867 installation scheme for all platforms.
1868
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001869- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001870 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001871
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001872- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1873 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1874 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1875
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001876- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1877 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1878 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1879
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001880- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1881
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001882- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1883
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001884- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1885 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1886
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001887- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1888 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1889 type pattern with the same value exists.
1890
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001891- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1892 when run from the command prompt).
1893
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001894- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1895 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1896
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001897- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1898 default sort).
1899
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001900- Added global runctx function to profile module
1901
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001902- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1903
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001904- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1905
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001906- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1907
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001908- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001909 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1910 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1911 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1912 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1913 accordingly.
1914
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001915- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1916 decoding standards.
1917
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001918- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1919 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1920 called for all requests.
1921
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001922- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1923 they are passed to the compiler.
1924
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001925- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1926 indent, width and depth.
1927
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001928- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1929 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1930
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001931- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1932 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1933
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001934- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1935
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001936- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1937
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001938- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1939
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001940- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1941 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1942
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001943- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001944 for better performance.
1945
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001946- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001947
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001948- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1949 a string).
1950
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001951- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1952
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001953- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1954
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001955- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1956
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001957- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1958
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001959- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1960 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1961 list of fieldnames.
1962
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001963- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1964 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1965
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001966- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1967
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001968- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1969 empty lists.
1970
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001971- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1972 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1973 and shelves.
1974
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001975- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1976 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1977
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001978- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001979 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1980 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001981
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001982- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1983 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001984 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001985
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001986- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001987 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1988 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1989
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001990- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1991 and removed in Py2.4.
1992
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001993- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1994
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001995- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1996
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001997Tools/Demos
1998-----------
1999
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002000- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2001 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2002
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002003- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2004
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002005- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2006 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2007 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2008 destination in situations where both files are given.
2009
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002010- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2011 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2012 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2013 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2014
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002015- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2016
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002017- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2018 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2019 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2020 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2021 now.
2022
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002023- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2024 in effect
2025
2026- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2027 C-c C-h
2028
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002029- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2030 -d option was given.
2031
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002032Build
2033-----
2034
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002035- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2036 build under OS X.
2037
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002038- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2039 --enable-profiling.
2040
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002041- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2042 is configured --with-tsc.
2043
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002044- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2045 on AMD64.
2046
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002047- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2048 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2049
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002050- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2051 removed.
2052
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002053- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2054 supported (see PEP 11).
2055
2056- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2057
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002058- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2059
2060- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2061 (see PEP 11).
2062
2063- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2064 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2065
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002066C API
2067-----
2068
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002069- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2070 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2071 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2072
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002073- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2074 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2075 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2076 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2077
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002078- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2079 generator objects.
2080
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002081- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2082 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002083 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2084 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002085
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002086- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2087 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2088
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002089- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2090 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2091 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2092 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2093 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2094
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002095- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2096 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2097 about 10% faster.
2098
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002099- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2100 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2101
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002102- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2103 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2104 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2105 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2106
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002107Windows
2108-------
2109
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002110- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2111 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2112 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2113 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2114
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002115- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2116 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2117 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2118
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002119
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002120What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2121===============================
2122
2123*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2124
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002125IDLE
2126----
2127
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002128- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2129 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2130 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2131 context-menu actions.
2132
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002133- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2134 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2135 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2136 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2137 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2138 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2139 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2140 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2141 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2142
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002143
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002144What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2145=============================================
2146
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002147*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002148
2149Core and builtins
2150-----------------
2151
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002152- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002153 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002154 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2155
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002156Extension modules
2157-----------------
2158
2159- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2160 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2161 than once. This has been fixed.
2162
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002163- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2164 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2165 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2166 call.
2167
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002168- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2169
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002170Library
2171-------
2172
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002173- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2174 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2175
2176- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2177 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2178 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2179 restored.
2180
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002181IDLE
2182----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002183
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002184- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002185
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002186Build
2187-----
2188
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002189- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2190 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2191
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002192C API
2193-----
2194
2195Windows
2196-------
2197
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002198- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2199 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2200
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002201- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2202
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002203Mac
2204---
2205
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002206- Various fixes to pimp.
2207
2208- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2209
2210- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2211 more problems than it solves.
2212
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002213
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002214What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2215=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002216
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002217*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2218
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002219Core and builtins
2220-----------------
2221
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002222- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2223 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2224
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002225- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2226 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002227 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002228
2229- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2230 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2231 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002232 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002233
2234- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2235 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002236
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002237- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2238 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2239 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2240
2241- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002242 770247.
2243
2244- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002245
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002246Extension modules
2247-----------------
2248
2249- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2250 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2251
2252- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2253
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002254- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2255
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002256- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2257 contained within the _strptime module.
2258
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002259- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2260 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2261
2262- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002263 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2264
2265- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2266 the find_class attribute, if present.
2267
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002268- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002269
2270 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2271 (SF bug 763298).
2272
2273 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002274 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2275 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2276 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002277
2278 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2279
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002280Library
2281-------
2282
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002283- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2284
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002285- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2286 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2287 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2288 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2289 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2290 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2291 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2292 or Tester().
2293
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002294- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2295 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2296 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2297 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2298 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2299 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2300 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2301 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2302 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002303
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002304 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002305
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002306- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2307 weren't before was an oversight.
2308
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002309- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2310 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2311
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002312- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2313 when there are no lines.
2314
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002315- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2316 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2317
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002318- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2319 to child processes.
2320
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002321- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2322
2323- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2324
2325- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2326 xmlrpclib.
2327
2328- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2329 responses.
2330
2331- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2332 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2333
2334- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2335 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2336 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2337
2338- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2339 used as patterns.
2340
2341- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2342 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2343 than Tk 8.3.
2344
2345- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2346
2347- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002348
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002349Tools/Demos
2350-----------
2351
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002352- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2353
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002354- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2355
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002356- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002357
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002358Build
2359-----
2360
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002361- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2362
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002363- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2364
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002365- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2366 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002367
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002368- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2369 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2370 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002371
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002372C API
2373-----
2374
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002375- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2376 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2377
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002378Windows
2379-------
2380
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002381- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2382 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2383 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2384 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2385 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2386 Python exception ::
2387
2388 thread.error: can't start new thread
2389
2390 is raised now.
2391
2392- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2393 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2394 instead of from DLL teardown.
2395
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002396Mac
2397---
2398
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002399- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002400 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002401 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2402 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2403 the executable in the bundle.
2404
2405- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002406
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002407- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2408
2409- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2410 on Panther.
2411
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002412What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2413================================
2414
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002415*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002416
2417Core and builtins
2418-----------------
2419
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002420- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2421 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2422 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2423 with the -i option.
2424
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002425- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2426 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2427
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002428- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2429 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2430
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002431- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2432 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2433 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2434 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2435 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2436 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2437 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2438 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2439 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2440 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2441 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2442 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2443 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002444
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002445- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2446 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2447 embedded in a lambda expression.
2448
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002449- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2450 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2451 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2452 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2453 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2454
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002455- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2456 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2457 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2458
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002459- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2460 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2461
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002462- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2463 It's writable again.
2464
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002465- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2466 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2467 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002468 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002469
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002470- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2471 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2472 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2473
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002474Extension modules
2475-----------------
2476
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002477- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2478 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2479
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002480- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2481 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2482 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2483 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2484
2485- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2486 collection.
2487
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002488- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2489 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2490 unique within a single program run.
2491
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002492- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2493 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2494
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002495- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2496 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2497
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002498- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2499 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002500
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002501- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2502
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002503- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2504 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2505
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002506- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2507 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2508 for many BSD-derived systems.
2509
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002510
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002511Library
2512-------
2513
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002514- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2515 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2516 primary ones:
2517
2518 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2519 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2520 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2521
2522 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2523 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2524 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2525 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2526 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2527 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2528
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002529- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2530 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2531 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2532 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2533 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2534 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2535 argument.
2536
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002537- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2538 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2539 in the archive.
2540
2541- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2542 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2543
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002544- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2545 569574).
2546
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002547- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2548 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2549 no more.
2550
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002551- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2552 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2553 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2554 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2555 code coverage.
2556
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002557- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2558 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2559 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002560 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2561 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002562
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002563- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2564 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2565 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002566 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002567
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002568- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2569
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002570- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2571 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2572 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2573 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2574
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002575- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2576 handling.
2577
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002578- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2579 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2580
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002581- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2582 in socket.py.
2583
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002584- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2585
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002586- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2587 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2588 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2589 opener with proxy support.
2590
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002591- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2592
2593- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2594
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002595Tools/Demos
2596-----------
2597
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002598- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2599
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002600- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2601
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002602- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2603 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002604
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002605- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2606 files.
2607
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002608Build
2609-----
2610
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002611- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002612 different root directory.
2613
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002614C API
2615-----
2616
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002617- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2618 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2619 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2620 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2621 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2622 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2623 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2624 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2625 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2626 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2627
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002628- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2629 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2630 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2631 from Python.
2632
2633
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002634New platforms
2635-------------
2636
2637None this time.
2638
2639Tests
2640-----
2641
2642- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2643 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2644
2645Windows
2646-------
2647
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002648- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2649
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002650- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2651 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2652 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2653 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2654 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2655 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2656 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2657 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2658 that's what it's for.
2659
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002660Mac
2661---
2662
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002663- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2664 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2665 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2666 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002667- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2668 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2669- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002670
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002671SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2672------------------------------------
2673
2674430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2675598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2676622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2677661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2678683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2679697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2680713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2681724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2682727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2683729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2684730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2685731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2686732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2687733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2688735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2689740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2690744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2691745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2692747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2693749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2694751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2695753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2696755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2697757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2698760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2699
2700
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002701What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2702================================
2703
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002704*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002705
2706Core and builtins
2707-----------------
2708
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002709- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2710 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2711
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002712- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2713 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2714 and cannot be strings).
2715
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002716- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2717 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2718 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2719 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2720
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002721- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2722 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2723 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2724 Python itself.
2725
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002726- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2727 the referenced object, if it has one.
2728
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002729- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2730 the thread started at
2731 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2732
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002733- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2734 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2735 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2736 placed on a list index.
2737
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002738- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2739 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2740 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2741 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2742
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002743- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2744 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2745 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2746 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2747 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2748 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2749 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2750
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002751- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2752 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2753 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2754 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2755 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2756
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002757- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2758 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002759
2760- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2761 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2762 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2763 #693195.)
2764
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002765- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2766 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002767
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002768- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002769 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002770 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2771 interpreter executions, would fail.
2772
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002773- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002774 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002775 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002776
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002777Extension modules
2778-----------------
2779
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002780- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2781 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2782 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2783 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2784
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002785- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2786 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2787
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002788- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2789 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2790 and Greg Chapman.)
2791
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002792- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2793 recursively.
2794
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002795- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002796 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2797 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2798 leaks.
2799
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002800- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2801
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002802- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2803 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2804 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2805 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2806 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2807 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2808 #705836.
2809
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002810- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002811 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2812
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002813- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2814 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2815 See SF bug #692416.
2816
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002817- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2818 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2819
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002820- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2821 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2822 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002823
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002824- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002825 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2826 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2827
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002828- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2829 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2830 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2831 timeouts to work properly.
2832
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002833Library
2834-------
2835
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002836- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2837 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2838 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2839 future release.
2840
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002841- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2842 for querying platform dependent features.
2843
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002844- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002845
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002846- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2847 pickle protocol versions.
2848
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002849- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2850 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2851 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2852
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002853- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2854
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002855- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2856 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2857 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2858 modules.
2859
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002860- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2861 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2862 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2863
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002864- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2865 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2866
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002867- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2868 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2869 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2870
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002871- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002872 MS Office extensions.
2873
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002874- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2875 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2876
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002877- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2878 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2879
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002880- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2881 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2882 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2883 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2884 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2885 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2886
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002887- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2888 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2889 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002890
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002891- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2892 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2893 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2894
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002895- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2896
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002897- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2898 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2899 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2900
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002901Tools/Demos
2902-----------
2903
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002904- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2905 See the module docstring for details.
2906
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002907Build
2908-----
2909
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002910- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2911 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002912
2913C API
2914-----
2915
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002916- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2917
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002918- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2919 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2920 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2921
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002922- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2923 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002924
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002925 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2926 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2927 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002928
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002929- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002930 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2931
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002932- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2933 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2934 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002935
2936New platforms
2937-------------
2938
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002939None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002940
2941Tests
2942-----
2943
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002944- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2945 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002946
2947Windows
2948-------
2949
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002950- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2951 function.
2952
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002953- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2954 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002955
2956Mac
2957---
2958
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002959- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2960 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002961
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002962- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2963 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002964
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002965- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2966 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2967 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002968
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002969- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002970 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2971 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002972
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002973- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2974 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002975
2976
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002977What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2978=================================
2979
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002980*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002981
2982Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002983-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002984
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002985- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2986 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2987 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2988
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002989- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2990 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2991 (SF patch #664376.)
2992
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002993- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2994 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2995 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2996 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2997 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2998 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002999 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003000
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003001- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3002 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3003 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3004 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003005 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003006
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003007- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3008 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3009 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3010 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3011 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3012 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3013 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3014 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3015 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3016 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3017 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3018
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003019- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3020 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3021 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3022 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3023 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3024 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3025
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003026- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3027 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3028
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003029- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3030 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3031 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3032 case.)
3033
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003034- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3035 passed as unicode strings.
3036
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003037- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3038 See SF bug #683467.
3039
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003040- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3041 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3042
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003043- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3044
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003045- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3046
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003047- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3048 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3049 arguments.
3050
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003051- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3052 See SF bug #667147.
3053
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003054- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003055 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003056 See SF bug #676155.
3057
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003058- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003059 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003060 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3061 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3062 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3063 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3064 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3065 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003066
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003067Extension modules
3068-----------------
3069
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003070- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3071 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3072 tp_as_number pointer.
3073
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003074- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3075 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3076 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3077 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3078 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3079
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003080- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3081
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003082- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3083
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003084- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003085 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003086 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3087 patch #678531.)
3088
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003089- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3090 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3091
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003092- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3093 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3094
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003095- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3096
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003097- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3098 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3099 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3100
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003101- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3102
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003103- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3104 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3105
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003106- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003107
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003108- datetime changes:
3109
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003110 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3111
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003112 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3113 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3114 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3115 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3116 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3117 now.
3118
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003119 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003120 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3121 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003122
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003123 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003124 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003125 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3126 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3127 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3128 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003129
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003130 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3131 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3132 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003133 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3134
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003135 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3136 by a later example coded by Guido.
3137
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003138 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003139 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3140 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3141 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003142 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3143 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3144
3145 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3146 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3147 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3148 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3149 tzinfo subclass instance.
3150
3151 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3152 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3153 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3154 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3155 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3156 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3157 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3158 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003159
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003160 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3161 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3162 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3163 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3164 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003165 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3166
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003167 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003168
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003169 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3170 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3171 as a naive datetime object.
3172
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003173 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3174 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3175 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3176
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003177 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3178 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3179 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3180 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3181 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3182 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3183 comparison.
3184
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003185 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3186 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3187 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3188 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003189 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003190
3191 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003192
3193 and ::
3194
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003195 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3196
3197 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3198 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3199 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3200 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3201
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003202 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3203 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3204 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3205 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3206 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3207
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003208 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3209 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003210 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3211 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003212
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003213Library
3214-------
3215
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003216- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3217 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3218
3219- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3220 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3221 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3222 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3223 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3224 See PEP 307 for details.
3225
3226- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3227 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3228
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003229- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3230 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003231 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003232 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3233 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003234 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003235
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003236- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3237 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3238
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003239- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3240 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3241 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3242
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003243- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3244
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003245- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3246 exception.
3247
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003248- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3249 class.
3250
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003251- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3252 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3253 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3254
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003255- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3256 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3257
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003258- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003259 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3260 See SF bug #659228.
3261
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003262- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3263 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3264 See SF patch #651082.
3265
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003266- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003267
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003268- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3269 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3270
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003271- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003272 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003273
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003274- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3275 DOS paths from other platforms.
3276
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003277Tools/Demos
3278-----------
3279
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003280- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3281 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3282 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3283 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3284 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3285 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3286 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3287 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3288 example:
3289
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003290 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3291 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003292
3293 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3294
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003295
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003296Build
3297-----
3298
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003299- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3300 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3301 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003302 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3303
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003304 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3305
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003306- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3307 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3308 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3309 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3310 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3311 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3312 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3313 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3314 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3315
3316- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3317 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3318 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3319 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3320
3321- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3322 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3323
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003324C API
3325-----
3326
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003327- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3328 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003329
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003330- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3331 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3332 tp_as_number pointer.
3333
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003334- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3335 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3336 (SF #681367)
3337
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003338- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3339 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3340 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3341 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003342
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003343Tests
3344-----
3345
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003346- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003347 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3348 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3349 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3350 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3351 pydoc.)
3352
3353- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3354
3355- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003356
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003357Windows
3358-------
3359
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003360- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3361 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3362 time).
3363
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003364- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3365 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3366
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003367- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3368 release without strong cryptography.
3369
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003370- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003371 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003372
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003373- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3374 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3375
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003376Mac
3377---
3378
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003379- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3380 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003381
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003382- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3383 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3384 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003385
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003386- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3387 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003388
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003389- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3390 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3391 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3392 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003393
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003394- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003395 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3396 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3397 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003398
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003399
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003400What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003401=================================
3402
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003403*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003407
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003408- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3409
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003410- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3411 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003412 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003413 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003414 a different meaning than before.
3415
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003416- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003417 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003418 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003419
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003420- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003421 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003422 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003423
3424- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3425 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3426 and deallocation.
3427
3428- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3429 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3430
3431- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3432 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3433 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3434 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3435 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3436
3437- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3438 now detected by the garbage collector.
3439
3440- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3441 [SF bug 519621]
3442
3443- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3444 identifier.
3445
3446- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3447 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3448 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3449 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3450 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3451 [SF bug 563060]
3452
3453- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3454 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3455 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3456 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3457 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3458
3459- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3460 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3461 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3462
3463- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3464
3465- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3466 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3467 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3468 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3469 state of the slots would be lost.)
3470
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003471Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003473
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003474- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003475 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3476 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3477 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3478 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003479 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3480 Jython 2.1.
3481
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003482- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003483 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003484 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3485 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3486 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3487 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3488 these, see PEP 302.
3489
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003490- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3491 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3492 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3493
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003494- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3495 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3496 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3497
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003498- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3499 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3500 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3501
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003502- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3503 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3504 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3505 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3506 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3507 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3508 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3509 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3510 releases or implementations.
3511
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003512- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003513 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3514 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003515
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003516- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3517 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3518
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003519- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3520 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3521 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3522
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003523- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3524 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3525
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003526- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3527 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003528 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3529 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003530
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003531- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3532 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3533 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3534 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3535 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3536
3537 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3538 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3539 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3540 pattern.
3541
3542 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3543 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3544 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3545 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3546
3547 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3548 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3549 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3550 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3551 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3552 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3553
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003554- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3555 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3556 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3557 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3558 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3559 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3560 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3561 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003562
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003563- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3564 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3565 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3566 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3567 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003568 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3569 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3570 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3571 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3572 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3573 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3574 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003575
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003576- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3577 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3578
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003579- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3580 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3581 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3582 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3583 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3584 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3585 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3586 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3587 to Zack Weinberg!
3588
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003589- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3590 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3591 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3592 type. This has been fixed now.
3593
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003594- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3595 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3596 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3597
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003598- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3599 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3600 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3601 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3602 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3603 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3604 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3605 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003606 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003607
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003608- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3609 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3610 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003611
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003612- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3613 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3614 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3615 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3616 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3617 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3618 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3619 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003620 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003621 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3622 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3623
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003624- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3625 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3626 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3627 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3628 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3629 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3630 this.)
3631
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003632- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3633 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003634 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003635 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003636 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3637 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003638 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3639 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003640
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003641- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3642 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3643 currently running.
3644
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003645- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3646 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3647 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3648 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3649
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003650- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3651 as directory names.
3652
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003653- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3654 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3655
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003656- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3657 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3658
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003659- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003660 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3661 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003662
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003663- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3664 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3665 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3666 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3667 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3668
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003669- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3670 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3671 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3672 removed.
3673
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003674- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3675 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3676 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3677
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003678- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3679 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3680 to __debug__.
3681
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003682- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3683 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3684 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3685
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003686- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3687 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3688 deprecated now.
3689
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003690- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3691 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3692 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003693
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003694- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3695 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3696 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3697 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3698 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003699
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003700- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3701 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3702
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003703- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3704 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3705 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003706 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003707 is backward compatible.
3708
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003709- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3710 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3711 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3712 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3713 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3714
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003715- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3716 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3717 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3718 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3719 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3720 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003721
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003722- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3723 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3724
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003725- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3726 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3727
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003728- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3729 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3730 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3731 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3732 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3733
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003734- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3735 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3736 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3737
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003738- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003739 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3740
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003741- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3742 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3743 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003744
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003745- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3746 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3747
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003748- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3749 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3750 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3751
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003752- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3753
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003754Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003756
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003757- Added three operators to the operator module:
3758 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3759 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3760 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3761
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003762- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3763
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003764- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3765 archives.
3766
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003767- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3768 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3769 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3770
3771 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3772
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003773- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3774 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3775 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003776 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003777
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003778- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3779 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3780 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3781 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003782 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3783 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3784 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3785 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003786
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003787- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3788 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003789
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003790- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3791
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003792- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3793 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3794
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003795- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3796 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3797 supported.
3798
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003799- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3800
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003801- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3802 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003803
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003804- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3805 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3806
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003807- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3808
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003809- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3810 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3811
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003812- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3813 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3814 functions but callable type objects.
3815
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003816- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003817 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003818 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003819
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003820- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3821 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003822
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003823- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3824 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003825
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003826- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3827 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3828 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3829 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3830
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003831- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3832 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003833
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003834- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3835 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3836 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3837 and __imul__.
3838
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003839- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003840 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3841 is called.
3842
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003843- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3844 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3845 interpreter was compiled.
3846
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003847- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3848 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3849 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003850 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003851 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3852 1, not 2.
3853
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003854- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3855 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3856 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3857 limit.
3858
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003859- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3860 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3861 bug #623464.
3862
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003863- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3864 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3865 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3866 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3867
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003868Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003870
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003871- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3872
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003873- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3874 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3875 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3876 with Python 2.3a2.
3877
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003878- os.path exposes getctime.
3879
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003880- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003881 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003882 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003883 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003884 unit tests of floating point results.
3885
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003886- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3887 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3888 has been increased.
3889
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003890- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3891 executed.
3892
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003893- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3894 postinstallation script.
3895
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003896- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3897 test the current module.
3898
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003899- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003900 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3901 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3902 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3903 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3904
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003905- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003906 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003907 Ward's Optik package.
3908
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003909- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3910 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3911 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3912 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3913
3914- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3915 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003916 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003917
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003918- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3919 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3920 shelf are binary pickles.
3921
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003922- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3923 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3924
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003925- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3926 modules are iterators now.
3927
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003928- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3929 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3930 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3931 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3932 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3933 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003934
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003935- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3936 with their entity value.
3937
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003938- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3939
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003940- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3941 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003942
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003943- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3944 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003945 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003946
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003947- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3948 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3949 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3950 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3951 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3952 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3953 main():
3954
3955 import locale
3956 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3957
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003958- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3959 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3960
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003961- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3962 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3963 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3964 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3965 to the new standard.
3966
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003967- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3968 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3969 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3970 an extension to the database.
3971
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003972- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3973 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3974 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3975 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003976 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003977
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003978- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003979 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003980
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003981- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3982 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3983 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3984 bounded integers.
3985
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003986- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3987 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3988 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3989 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3990 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3991 in existence.
3992
3993 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3994 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3995 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3996 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3997 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3998 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3999
4000 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4001 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4002 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4003 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4004
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004005- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4006 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4007 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4008
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004009- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4010
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004011- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4012 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4013 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4014 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4015
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004016- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4017 argument.
4018
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004019- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4020 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4021 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4022 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4023 [SF patch 560794].
4024
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004025- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4026 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4027 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004028 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4029 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4030 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004031
4032- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4033 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004034
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004035- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4036 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4037 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4038 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004039
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004040- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4041 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4042 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4043 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4044 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4045
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004046- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004047
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004048- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4049
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004050- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4051 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4052 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4053 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4054 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4055 identical to None.
4056
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004057- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4058 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4059 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4060 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4061 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4062 results now.
4063
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004064- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4065 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4066
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004067- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4068 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4069 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4070 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4071 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4072 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4073 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4074 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4075
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004076- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4077
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004078- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4079 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4080
4081- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4082 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4083 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4084 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4085 and other systems.
4086
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004087- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4088 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4089 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4090 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 +00004091 work well with these.
4092
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004093- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4094
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004095- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004096 connections.
4097
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004098- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4099 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4100 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4101
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004102- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4103 sets
4104
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004105- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4106 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4107 name.
4108
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004109- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4110 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4111 passed in.
4112
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004113- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004114 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004115 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4116 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004117
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004118- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4119
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004120- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4121
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004122- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4123 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4124 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4125
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004126- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4127 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4128 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4129 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004130 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004131
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004132- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004133 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004134 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004135
4136- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4137 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4138 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4139
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004140- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004141 the value of its expression argument.
4142
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004143- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4144 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4145 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4146
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004147- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4148 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4149 skipstone browser was included.
4150
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004151- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4152 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4153
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004154Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004156
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004157- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4158 names in addition to accepting file names.
4159
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004160- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4161 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4162 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4163 still used and useful.)
4164
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004165- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4166 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4167 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4168 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004169
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004170- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4171 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4172 the generated binary.
4173
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004174Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004176
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004177- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4178
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004179- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4180 except in the hands of experts.
4181
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004182- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004183 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4184 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4185 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004186
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004187- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4188 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4189 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4190 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4191 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4192 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4193 builds.
4194
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004195- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4196 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4197 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4198 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4199 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4200 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4201 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4202 new type.
4203
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004204- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004205
4206 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4207 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4208 positive infinities.
4209
4210 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4211 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4212 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4213 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4214 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4215 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4216 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4217
4218 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4219
4220 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4221
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004222- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4223 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4224 size of the executable.
4225
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004226- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4227 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4228 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4229 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004230
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004231- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4232
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004233- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4234 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4235 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004236
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004237- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4238 well as Unix.
4239
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004240- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4241 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4242 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4243 modules in the README file for details.
4244
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004245C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004247
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004248- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4249 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004250 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004251 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004252 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004253
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004254- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4255 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4256 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4257 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4258 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4259 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004260 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004261 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4262 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4263 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4264 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4265 aligned.)
4266
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004267- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4268 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4269 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4270
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004271- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4272 level.
4273
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004274- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4275 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4276 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4277 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4278 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4279
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004280- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4281 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4282 code.
4283
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004284- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4285 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4286 adjusting for negative indices.
4287
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004288- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4289 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4290 object.
4291
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004292- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4293 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4294 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4295
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004296- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4297 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004298
4299- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4300
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004301- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4302 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4303 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4304 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4305
4306- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4307
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004308- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004309
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004310- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004311 without going through the buffer API.
4312
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004314
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004315- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4316 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4317 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4318 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4319
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004320- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4321 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4322
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004323- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004324 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004326New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004328
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004329- OpenVMS is now supported.
4330
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004331- AtheOS is now supported.
4332
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004333- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4334
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004335- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4336
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004337Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338-----
4339
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004340- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4341 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4342 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004343
4344Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004346
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004347- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4348 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4349 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4350 bugs.
4351 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004352 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004353 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4354 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004355 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004356
4357- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004358 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004359
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004360- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4361 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4362
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004363- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4364 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004365 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004366 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4367
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004368- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4369 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4370 use files" uninstall option).
4371
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004372- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4373
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004374- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4375 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4376
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004377- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4378 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4379 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4380
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004381- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4382 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4383 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4384 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4385 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004386 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4387 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4388 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004389
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004390- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004391 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004392 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4393 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4394 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4395 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4396 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4397 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4398 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4399 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4400 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4401 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4402 work around.
4403
4404- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4405 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4406 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4407 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4408 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4409 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4410 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4411 specified with O_CREAT too).
4412
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004413Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414----
4415
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004416- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004417
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004418- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4419 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4420 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4421
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004422- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4423 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4424 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4425
4426- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4427 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4428 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4429 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4430 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4431 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4432 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4433 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004434
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004435- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4436 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4437 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004438
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004439- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4440 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4441 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4442 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4443 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004444
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004445- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4446 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4447 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004448
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004449- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4450 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004451
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004452- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4453 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4454 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4455 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4456 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004457
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004458- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4459 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4460 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4461
4462- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4463 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4464 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004465
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004466- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4467 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4468 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4469 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004470 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004471
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004472- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4473 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004474
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004475- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4476 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004477
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004478- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004479 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004480 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4481 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004482
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004484What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004485===============================
4486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4488
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004489Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004491
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004492- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4493 with a custom metaclass.
4494
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004495Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004497
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004498- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4499 are proxies.
4500
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004501Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004503
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004504- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4505 very short strings.
4506
4507- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4508 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4509 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4510 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4511 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4512
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004513Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004515
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004516- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4517 close or delete time).
4518
4519- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4520 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4521
4522- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4523
4524- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004525 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004526
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004527Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004529
4530Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004532
4533C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004535
4536New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004538
4539Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004541
4542Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004544
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004545- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4546
4547- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4548 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4549
4550- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4551 deleted at process exit time.
4552
4553- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4554 in backslash.
4555
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004556Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004558
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004559- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4560 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4561 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4562
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004563
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004564What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004565===========================
4566
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4568
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004571
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004572- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4573 been extensively updated. See
4574
4575 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4576
4577 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4578
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004579- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4580 deleted!
4581
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004582- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4583 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4584 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4585 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4586 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4587
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004588- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4589
4590 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4591 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4592
4593 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4594 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4595 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4596 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4597 supported anyway.
4598
4599 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4600 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4601
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004602- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4603 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4604 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4605 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4606 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004607
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004608- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4609 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4610 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4611
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004612Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004614
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004615- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4616 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4617 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4618 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4619 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4620 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004621 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4622 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4623 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4624 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004625
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004626- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4627 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4628 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4629
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004630Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004632
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004633- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4634
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004635Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004637
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004638- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4639 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4640 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4641 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4642 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4643 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4644
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004645- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4646
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004647- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4648
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004649- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4650
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004651- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4652 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4653 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4654
4655- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4656
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004657Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004659
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004660- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4661 off a search on Google.
4662
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004663Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004665
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004666- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4667 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4668 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4669 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4670 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4671 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4672 other platforms should do likewise.
4673
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004674- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4675 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4676 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4677
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004678C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004680
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004681- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4682 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4683 producing key-value pairs.
4684
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004685- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004686 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004687 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4688 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4689 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4690 previously went unchallenged.
4691
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004692New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004694
4695Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004697
4698Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004700
4701Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004703
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004704- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4705 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004706
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004707- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4708 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4709 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4710 home.
4711
4712
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004713What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004714===========================
4715
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4717
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004718Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004720
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004721- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4722 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004723
4724 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004725 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004726
4727 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4728 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004729 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004730 This needs to be documented.
4731
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004732- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4733 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4734
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004735- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4736 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4737 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4738
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004739- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4740 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4741
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004742- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4743 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4744 class forbids it).
4745
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004746- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4747 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4748 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4749
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004750- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4751
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004752Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004754
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004755- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4756 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004757 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004758
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004759- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4760 (like 1 + '').
4761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004762Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004764
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004765- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4766 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4767 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4768 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004769 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004770 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4771
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004772- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4773 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4774 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4775 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4776
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004777- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4778 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004779 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4780 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4781 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004782
4783- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4784 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004785
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004786- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4787 bytes on its input.
4788
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004789Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004791
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004792- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004793 convenience function.
4794
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004795- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4796 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4797 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004798 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4799 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4800 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4801 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4802 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4803 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004804
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004805- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4806 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4807 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4808 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4809
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004810- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4811 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4812 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4813
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004814- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4815 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4816 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4817 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4818
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004819- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4820 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004822 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4823 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4824 new -l and -e options.
4825
4826- statcache is now deprecated.
4827
4828- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4829 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004831 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4832 time properly taken into account.
4833
4834- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4835 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4836 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4837 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4838
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004839Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004841
4842Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004844
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004845- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4846 is built with libdb3 if available.
4847
4848- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4849
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004850C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004852
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004853- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4854 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4855 PySequence_Size().
4856
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004857- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4858
4859- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4860 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4861 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4862
4863- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4864 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4865
4866- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4867 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004869New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004871
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004872- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4873 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4874
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004875- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4876 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4877
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004878- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4879
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004880Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004882
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004883- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4884 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4885
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004886Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004888
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004889Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004891
4892- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4893 removed completely in the next release.
4894
4895- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4896 OSX.
4897
4898- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4899 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4900
4901- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4902
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004903
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004904What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004905===========================
4906
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4908
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004909Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004911
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004912- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004913 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004914 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004915 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4916 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004917 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4918 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004919 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4920 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004921
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004922- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4923 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4924
4925- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4926 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4927
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004928Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004930
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004931- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4932 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4933 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4934 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4935 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4936 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4937 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4938 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4939
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004940- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4941 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4942 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4943 example).
4944
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004945- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004946 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004947 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004948 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004949
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004950- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4951 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4952 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004953 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004954
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004955- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4956 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4957 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4958 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4959 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4960 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4961
4962 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4963
4964 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4965
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004966Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004968
4969- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4970
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004971- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4972
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004973- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4974 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004975
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004976- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4977 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4978 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4979 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4980 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4981 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004982 attributes.
4983
4984- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4985 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4986 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004987
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004988- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4989 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4990 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004991
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004992- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4993 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4994 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004995 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4996 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4997
4998- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4999 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005000
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005001Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005003
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005004- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5005 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5006
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005007- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5008 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5009 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5010 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5011
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005012- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5013 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5014 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5015 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5016
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005017 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5018 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5019 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5020 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5021 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5022 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5023 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5024 without losing information).
5025
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005026- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005027 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5028 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5029 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5030 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5031 module).
5032
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005033 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005034 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5035 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5036 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5037 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005038
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005039- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005040 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5041 encoding.
5042
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005043- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5044 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5045
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005047 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5048
5049- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5050 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5051 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5052 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5053
5054- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5055
5056- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5057 ON, and OFF.
5058
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005059- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5060 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5061
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005062Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005064
5065- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5066 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5067 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005068
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005069- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5070 been added: -X and -E.
5071
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005072Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005074
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005075- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5076 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5077
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005078C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005080
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005081- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5082 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5083 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5084 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5085 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5086
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005087- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5088 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5089 as long) arguments.
5090
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005091- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5092 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5093 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5094 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5095 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5096 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5097
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005098- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5099 input.
5100
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005101New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005103
5104Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005106
5107Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005109
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005110- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5111 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5112 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5113
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005114- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5115 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5116 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005117 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005118
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5120 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5121 import signal
5122 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005123
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005125 while 1:
5126 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005128 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5129 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5130 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5131 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005132
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005133
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005134What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5135===========================
5136
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5138
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005139Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005141
5142- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5143 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5144 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5145
5146- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5147 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5148 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5149 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5150 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5151 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5152 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005153
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005154- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005155 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005156 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5157 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5158 associate a docstring with a property.
5159
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005160- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5161 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5162 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5163 other built-in object types.
5164
5165- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5166 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5167 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5168 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5169 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5170
5171- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5172 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5173
5174- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5175 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005176 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005177 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5178 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5179 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5180 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5181 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5182
5183- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5184 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5185 class.
5186
5187- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5188 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5189 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5190 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5191
5192- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5193 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5194 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5195 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5196
5197- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5198 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5199
5200- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5201 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5202 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5203 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5204 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005205 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005206 with the same value as s.
5207
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005208- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5209
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005210Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005212
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005213- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5214
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005215- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5216 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5217 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5218 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5219 objects.
5220
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005221- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5222 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005223 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5224 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5225
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005226- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5227 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5228 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5229
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005230Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005232
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005233- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5234 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5235 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5236 by the instances.
5237
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005238- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5239 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5240 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5241
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005242- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5243 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5244 before the entire comparison is complete.
5245
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005246- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5247 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5248 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5249
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005250- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5251 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5252 getwriter().
5253
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005254- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5255 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5256
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005257- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005258 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5259 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5260
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005261- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5262 iterable object.
5263
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005264- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5265 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005266
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005267- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5268 authentication.
5269
5270- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5271 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005272
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005273- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005274 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5275 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5276 a sample driver.)
5277
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005278Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005279-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005280
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005281- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5282 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5283 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5284 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5285 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5286 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5287 kernel has large file support.
5288
5289- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5290 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5291 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5292 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5293 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5294
5295- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5296 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5297 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5298
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005299C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005301
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005302- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5303 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5304
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005305New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005307
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005308- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5309 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5310
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005311Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005313
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005314- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5315 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5316 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5317 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5318 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5319
5320- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5321 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5322 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5323 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5324
5325- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5326 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5327
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005328Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005330
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005331- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005332 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5333 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005334
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005335
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005336What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5337===========================
5338
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5340
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005341Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005342----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005343
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005344- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5345 big to represent as a C double.
5346
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005347- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5348 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5349 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5350 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5351 restriction).
5352
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005353- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5354 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5355 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5356 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5357 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5358
5359 >>> dir([])
5360 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5361 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5362 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5363 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5364 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5365 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5366 'reverse', 'sort']
5367
5368 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5369
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005370- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005371 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5372 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5373 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5374 OverflowError exception.
5375
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005376- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005377 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005378 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5379 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5380 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5381 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5382 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005383 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5385 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5386
5387 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5388 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5389 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5390 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005392- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005393 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5394 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5395 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5396 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5397 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5398 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5399 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5400 once it is created.
5401
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005402- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5403 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5404 (key, value) pairs.
5405
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005406- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005407 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5408 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5409
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005410- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5411 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5412 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5413 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5414 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005415
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005416- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005417 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5418 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5419
5420 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5421
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005422- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005423 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5424
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005425Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005427
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005428- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005429 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5430 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005431
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005432- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5433 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5434 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5435 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5436 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5437 in this area anymore).
5438
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005439- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5440 threading.Timer.
5441
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005442- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5443 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5444
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005445- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005446 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5447
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005448- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005449 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5450 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5451 converted to Python longs.
5452
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005453- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005454 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5455
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005456- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5457 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5458 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5459
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005460Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005462
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005463- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5464 division operators as per PEP 238.
5465
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005466Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005468
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005469- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5470 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5471 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5472 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5473
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005474C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005475-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005476
5477- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005478
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005479- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5480 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005481 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5484 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005485 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005487
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005488- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005489 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5490 module:
5491
5492 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005493
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005494 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5495 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005496
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005497 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5498 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005499
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005500 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5501
5502 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5503
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005504- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005505 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5506 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5507 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005508
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005509New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005510-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005511
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005512- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5513 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5514 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5515 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5516 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005517
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005518Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005520
5521Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005522-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005523
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005524- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5525 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5526 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5527 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005528 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5529 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5530 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5531 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5532 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005534- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005535 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5536
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005537
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005538What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5539===========================
5540
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005541*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5542
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005543Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005544-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005545
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005546- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5547 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5548
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005549- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5550 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5551 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005552
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005553- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5554 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5555 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5556 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005557
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005558- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5559
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005560- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005561
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005562Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005564
5565- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005566 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005567 the module docstring for details.
5568
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005569Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005571
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005572- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005573 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5574 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5575 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005576
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005577- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5578 Nick Mathewson.
5579
5580Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005581----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005582
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005583- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5584 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5585 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5586 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5587 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5588 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5589 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5590 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5591
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005592- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5593 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5594 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5595 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5596
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005597- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5598 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5599 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5600 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5601 come a long way).
5602
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005603- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5604 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5605 write filters for these warnings).
5606
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005607- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5608 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5609 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5610 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5611 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5612
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005613- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5614 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5615 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5616 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5617 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5618 older distribution.
5619
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005620Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005621-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005622
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005623- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5624 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005625 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005626
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005627- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5628 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5629 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5630
5631- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5632
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005633- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5634
5635- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5636
5637- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005639- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005640
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005641- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5642
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005643New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005644-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005645
5646C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005647-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005648
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005649- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5650 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5651 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5652 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5653 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5654 against buffer overruns.
5655
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005656- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005657 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5658 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005659 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5660 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5661 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5662
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005663- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5664 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5665 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5666 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5667 deprecated.
5668
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005669Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005671
5672- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5673 relevant is found.
5674
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005675
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005676What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005677===========================
5678
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005679*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5680
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005681Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005682----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005683
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005684- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5685 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5686 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5687 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5688 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5689 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5690 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5691 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005692 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005693 repaired.
5694
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005695- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005696 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005697 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5698 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5699 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5700 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5701 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5702 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5703 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5704 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5705
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005706- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5707 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5708 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5709 leading BMO character).
5710
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005711- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5712 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5713 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5714
5715 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5716 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5717 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005718
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005719 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5720 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5721 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5722 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5723 for various simple to use conversions.
5724
5725 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5726 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5727
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005728 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5729 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5730 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5731 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5732 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5733 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5734 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5735 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5736 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5737 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5738 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5739 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5740 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5741 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5742 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005743
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005744- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5745 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5746 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005747 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005748 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005749
5750 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005751 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5752 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5753 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5754 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5755 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005756 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5757 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005758
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005759 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5760 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5761 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005762 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005763
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005764- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5765 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5766 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5767 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5768 floating arithmetic,
5769
5770 x = 9007199254740992.0
5771 print long(x)
5772
5773 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5774 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5775 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5776 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5777 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5778 functions are of good quality).
5779
5780 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5781 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5782 algorithms to break.
5783
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005784- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5785 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5786 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5787 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5788 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5789 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5790 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5791 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5792 order.
5793
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005794- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5795 operation along the most common code paths.
5796
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005797- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5798 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5799
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005800- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5801 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5802 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5803 {}.update(UserDict())
5804
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005805- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5806 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5807 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5808 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5809 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5810 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5811 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5812 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5813
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005814- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005815 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005816
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005817 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005818 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5819 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005820 join() method of strings
5821 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005822 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5823 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005824 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005825 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005826
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005827- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5828 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5829
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005830- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5831 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5832
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005833- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5834 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5835 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5836 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5837
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005838- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5839 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005840 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005841 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5842 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005843
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005844- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5845
5846
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005847Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005848-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005849
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005850- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005851 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005852 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5853 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5854
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005855- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5856 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5857
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005858- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5859 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5860 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5861 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5862
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005863- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5864 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5865 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5866
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005867- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5868
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005869- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5870
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005871- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5872 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5873 that are still imported into string.py).
5874
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005875- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5876
5877- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5878 Now it does.
5879
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005880- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5881
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005882- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5883 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5884 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5885 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5886 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005887 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5888 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005889
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005890- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5891 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5892 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5893 'help(object)'.
5894
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005895Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005896-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005897
5898- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005899 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005900 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5901 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5902
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005903- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005904 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5905 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005906
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005907C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005908-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005909
5910- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5911 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005912
5913----
5914
5915**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**